Woohoo! April! Yeah!

Need I say more?
Okay, I probably should tone it down a little here. April was pretty good, but it wasn't earth shatteringly good. I think the reason why I liked April is I was able to keep up the earned SP amount set in March. After that, I guess we'll see how the numbers fell.

So, let's take a look.

Quick Summary

At the end of last month's report, I was hoping to be able to maintain a high level of production like I did in March. I'm happy to report that for the most part, I did that. The only let down was the last few days of April.

Something else I'm happy about is that I was able to amass SP without depending on major upvotes. In May, there was only one double digit payout, but there were several smaller payouts that all contributed. It helps when the rewards are more than $0.25.

Plus, I managed to do something I haven't done since around this time last year. More on that in a moment. First, it's time to break it all down.

Posts (no comments)—23

This is a drop from the 30 in March, but I'm okay with it, since I decided to go for a post a day during the week, and none on the weekends. That meant five a week. It's hard to come up with additional posts, as well as keep comment count high, and more posts in a day isn't necessarily better in my experience. It definitely depends on the circumstances, and to those who can manage to do it and keep up the amount of rewards on each one, more power to them.

As mentioned earlier, there was only one double digit reward post this time around, but there were a total of 11 others that made more than $1 come payout, and seven of those made a few to several times that amount. It all adds up. Plus I had several Musing answers that paid out above $1 or just below, that also helped. While they didn't count as posts, they might as well, since some are definitely long enough to be a post.

As mentioned last month, I've continued the character reveals from my comic book/graphic novel work in progress MISSES, along with the Food Fight Friday posts, and I've managed to put together a five minute freewrite on Thursdays, combining previously unused prompts. The stories take longer than five minutes to write, but I've enjoyed the creative part of it quite a bit.

Total posts all time at the end of April came to 416.

Comments—1060

This amounts to an improvement of nearly 330 total comments. In doing so, I was able to get my comment numbers up enough that I won @abh12345's Engagement League twice in April. It's been since last May that I managed to get to No. 1, so I'm pretty happy about that.

As I posted on April 5, I passed the 10,000 comments mark all time, and as of the end of April, I was less than a hundred away from 11,000. It would be great to stay at a 1,000-plus comment clip per month, but it's not the easiest of things for me to do.

Upvotes given—384/1,475

The vote spread edged up from April, while the total votes exceeded April by nearly 300 total votes. My widening attempt didn't get very far, but I feel good about upvoting nearly 400 different users in a month. Manually curating, I'm not sure how much more I can do, even though I've done much more in a month. The last several weeks has been tough to find people posting as much as they were, and while I do go looking for new users every week, I wasn't finding enough new folks as I was losing others I'd upvoted in previous weeks, so it's been an odd dynamic lately.

Upvotes received—1,676/2,876

It never seems like I get a lot of upvotes from so many different people, but once again, another month's worth of voting stats go proving me wrong. In April, the upvote spread for all my posts and comments was nearly 90 more than last month's amount, while total upvotes declined by nearly 70.

That's odd to me since there were three sizable upvotes from two different curation trails last month, while this month there was only one. So, somehow I managed to attract more upvotes without the help of so many trails. I think that's a good thing, even if I'm having a hard time believing the overall numbers.

SP increase—247.844

After February's dip below three digit earned SP, I was concerned I might not be able to do it again. Now, for the second straight month, earned SP is in the 240 range. April's amount is a new second best, beating out March's 242.735. The combination of posting, commenting, curating, Musing and winning the engagement league proved to be the majority of earned SP. I should note, however, that the amount of SP I earn as a stakeholder is increasing, too, but at this point it's been tough to nail down a rate.

I'll need to see if I can keep better track of that.

All told, earned SP sits at 2,364.667. That pushes 2019's total to 768.144.

Year over year earned SP for April improved by over 188, as 59.107 is all I did in 2018.

The total earned SP added to the amount invested in STEEM makes my per STEEM cost drop from $0.885 at the end of March to $0.805. Also, STEEM value to make me a millionaire with April end's stake is now $145.324, down $5-plus from March.

Highest single payout—5.120 SBD/12.324 SP

The honor of highest payout in April went to In Search of Leprechaun Gold: A Short, Weird Trip. This was actually a freewrite where I combined six unused prompts from previous days. Sometimes, I know more or less where a story is going, and other days, I have no clue. This was more of the latter than the former. I had a photo I'd taken of a rainbow that appeared to end on top of a neighbor's house. I figured I work in gold and leprechauns into it somehow, but the prompts didn't really go with such a story, so things got a little weird.

Weird enough to be liked, apparently.

The curie curation trail upvote was mostly responsible for it. No OCD upvotes this time.

Self-upvotes—0

I managed to control myself all month, so no accidental upvotes.

Contests—5

In addition to winning the aforementioned engagement league twice, I also came in third and fourth, which also came with STEEM awards. All told I won 14.5 STEEM. I also received 1 STEEM from the curie curation contest, and a total of 2.112 in STEEM from four steem bounty awards. Rounding out this category with other rewards/donations, I received $0.2 SBDs in tips.

Flags given/received—2

The anklebiters doubled their efforts in April over March.

Reputation Ranking—64

After reaching a reputation ranking of 64 towards the end of March, I remained at such throughout April, though the meter did move up to 64.533.

Investment—0

After going up some, STEEM reversed and went into a sideways motion before trending down again. The idea of investing has again been on my mind, but as of yet, I have not done anymore. I'm pretty much holding to less than $0.10 to invest, but I'm hoping to see the annual bump take place between now and the end of July. I keep reading that things are starting to line up for higher values, but so far, it's headed down, not up.

Miscellaneous

All in all, I feel good about April. Being able to earn over 240 SP again in a month is a good thing. Upping my comment levels to place in the Top 5 every week in April is a good thing. Widening out my upvote net to include a couple dozen more users is good, too.

And yet, I don't feel like I have much consistency when it comes to receiving upvotes. The amounts are truly all over the board. I'm not sure what to do about that other than to consistently post every day and try to reach as many other people as I can through comments and upvoting.

I'd like to predict another 200-plus SP month in May, but there's a few things conspiring against me having enough time to make it happen. My youngest son's wife is due with their second child any day now, which means I could be called into watching our granddaughter at any moment. Plus, it's time we got our garden started, and other yard work finished. Probably need to get more fence replaced.

Now that I've got all the known excuses for doing lousy in May out of the way, time to put this post to bed.

Onward and upward.

_{Image source—Pixabay. Text added by Glen Anthony Albrethsen.}