Most experienced bloggers might already be familiar with the concept of a blog carnival, but for the uninitiated, we’ve put together some tips and advice about blog carnivals, including a description of the blog carnival concept, its history, and how bloggers can benefit from it. A blog carnival is a unique blogging event designed to share ideas amongst bloggers that have an interest in similar subject matter, say e-commerce, online marketing, personal finance or education. The carnival is published on a regular basis, often times either weekly or monthly. Ben Vershbow, Editorial Director for the Institute for the Future of the Book, accurately describes the blog carnival as a “traveling festival of ideas, a party that moves from house to house.” The carnivals are usually focused on a generalized topic but will often times incorporate more tightly focused sub-topics as well as a “theme” for discussion purposes.
“A blog carnival is like a roving journal, a rotating showcase of interesting writing from around the blogosphere within a particular discipline. Individual bloggers volunteer to host a carnival on their personal blog, acting as chief editor for that edition. It falls to them to collect noteworthy items, and to sort through suggestions from the community, many of which are direct submissions from authors. On the appointed date (carnivals generally keep to a regular schedule) the carnival gets published and the community is treated to a richly annotated feast of new writing in the field,” Ben Vershbow
The carnival host will post a few words or personal remarks about an article submitted to the site by fellow bloggers and then post a link directly to the article.
Most carnivals have a “hub” site or a centralized location that serves to archive past editions of the carnival as well as a schedule of upcoming carnivals. The blog posts themselves exist separately from the carnival’s hub on the various blogs that make up that particular blogging community. The variety of blog carnival topics is vast and covers practically every topic imaginable including personal finance, technology, ecommerce, fitness, science, and business among others.
Benefits for Bloggers
Blog carnivals represent a significant opportunity for bloggers to increase their exposure to their respective community and can go a long way to help growing readership. If done correctly, hosting blog carnivals and featuring quality posts is a great way to gain the attention of respected bloggers in your community as well as a catalyst to help establish and build your reputation and authority. One of the most attractive benefits of the blog carnival system is that it is entirely free and fits in nicely with Google’s webmaster guidelines for merit-based link building. While the impact to your search engine rankings with links obtained from blog carnivals is debatable, there’s no question that participating in blog carnivals by submitting your posts as well as actually hosting the carnivals themselves can significantly raise your visibility in your blogosphere’s community.
It’s important to keep in mind that you can’t just submit posts indiscriminately. The host of each respective carnival will pick and choose from only the best posts they receive. Carnival hosts will uphold your articles to certain standards and will consider the relevance of the post, its length, quality, tone and originality. The articles you submit do not have to be journalistic masterpieces but you’d be better served to only submit your highest quality blog posts. Submitting poor quality posts could damage your reputation in your respective community and might severely impair your credibility for inclusion in any future carnivals.
Submitting to a Blog Carnival
Hosts of the carnivals are on a volunteer basis. Sometimes the same blogger hosts the same carnival continuously. Other carnivals will travel from site to site and with the most popular and authoritative carnivals subject to long waits for hosting. Blog Carnival (surprise!) is the name of the centralized site that organizes many of these carnivals. Admittedly, submitting to carnivals can be a bit tedious as each carnival has different deadlines and submission requirements but after you get up the learning curve, it’s well worth the effort. There are blog carnival submission tools that you can utilize as well that can help to automate the submission process for you:
Be very, very careful with any auto submission tool that you consider however as auto-submission tools can easily be misused. Often times, over eager submitters end up angering blog carnival hosts by submitting too many posts to the same carnival all at once. Be sure to respect the submission rules of each carnival that you submit to or you could be permanently banned. There are manual carnival submission services to consider as well, like Write And Promote, that provide all-inclusive post submission services to relevant carnivals on a weekly or monthly basis. The best option is to manually submit to the carnivals on your own. Manual submission services will charge a monthly fee for their services and are admittedly more expensive than the cost of the automated tools previously mentioned, but are well worth the price if you can afford it.
Related Posts:
- Guest Blogging: Tips, Advice, and Best Practices - Guest blogging is simply the idea of serving as a guest writer for another blog or website. While the concept might be simple, guest blogging...
- First Edition of the E-Commerce, Online Marketing, Social Media Blog Carnival - Welcome to the first edition of the E-Commerce, Online Marketing and Social Media Blog Carnival. Thanks to everyone who participated in our first edition. There...
- How Fresh Content Can Increase Your Website Traffic - Regardless of how fabulous your online store is, there are a few basic things that you can do as a new site owner to ensure...
- 7 Tips for Creating Unique Content That Doesn’t Suck - As bloggers, we’ve all struggled with the following question at one point or another: “What can I write about now?” Sometimes it feels like all...
- 10 Simple Tips to Build Your Business With Facebook - Facebook is definitely an up-and-coming resource for businesses to promote themselves. But more than simply for promotional use, it has proven itself to be the...
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Blog carnivals are great networking tools. You meet lots of people and get a lot of linking going on. Plus, it’s beneficial for readers because they can read posts they might have missed elsewhere.
{ 4 trackbacks }