How to Use a Blog Carnival to Increase Web Traffic

Blog carnivals are a really great way for bloggers to promote the posts that are on their own sites while also networking with others in the blogosphere. Here's a look at how to make the most of the blog carnival to increase traffic to your website.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Your own blog with regularly updated posts.
• Internet connection.
• A few hours of time.

1. Go to the blog carnival web page located at http://blogcarnival.com/bc/. This is a collection of all of the different blog carnivals that are maintained around the web.

2. Sign up for your free account with the blog carnival community. This will allow you to browse through the blog carnivals that are available for you to submit your posts to and then go through the submission process.

3. Click on "browse all carnivals" on the left side of the main page. This will take you to a list of all of the available carnivals.

4. Search through the carnivals listed here in order to find the carnivals that are most relevant for your submissions. You can browse through specific categories using the drop down menu, search by keyword or organize the selections based on the latest of next edition of the blog carnival.

5. Start clicking on the relevant carnivals to get more information about them. When you click on the name of a carnival, you will be taken to a new page that gives you a description for the carnival, relevant keywords and topics for your submission, the submission deadline and the link to the site that hosts the carnival. You should read this information carefully to make sure that you are submitting to carnivals that are relevant to your blog.

6. Go to your blog and choose a post that is most relevant to the carnival. Copy the permalink URL to the specific post that you are submitting.

7. Go back to the details page for the blog carnival to which you are submitting. Scroll down to the "submit an article" button and click on it. Paste the permalink URL into the available area. Fill in the additional information that is requested on the submission page including a witty or interesting remark about your submission. Click to "submit". You will receive an email confirming your submission.

8. Wait for the carnival to go live. The blog carnival should have a date listed for this. When it goes live, make sure to leave a comment on the blog carnival post.

9. Take the time to visit all of the other submissions that were also included in the carnival. Leave a comment on those posts as well to do some basic blog networking.

10. Head to your blog and write a post about the fact that you've been featured in a blog carnival. Include a link to your original submission and the blog carnival itself. You may also want to summarize the rest of the content in the carnival and link out to those posts as well in order to generate traffic from those sites to yours.

11. Inform others about your blog carnival inclusion through your social networking sites. Use Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to link people to the blog carnival.

12. Stay active with blog carnival submissions. The more that you do this, the more traffic you're going to see coming to your blog.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider hosting a blog carnival of your own once you've gotten the hang of how they work. Some carnivals are traveling carnivals so you can be the one-time host for the carnival.
• You can contact blog carnival hosts through the "contact" link which is found on the description page for each blog carnival.
• Also on the description place is a button to "add to favorites" which lets you collect your favorite carnivals in one place so that you can easily return to them.
• Make sure that you always read the submission requirements for a blog carnival carefully and that your post is truly appropriate to the carnival.
• It is proper etiquette to link back to the blog carnival once it goes live so make sure that you do this.

Resources

• Blog Carnival FAQ
• Wikipedia on Blog Carnivals
• Examples of How to Link Back to Blog Carnivals

[SueJ]

on 3/2/2009 I have looked at this before but was confused. Thanks for a great explanation of Blog Carnival. 5*