Working at Home on the Internet

Is Hosting a Blog Carnival Worth the Effort?

In my opinion, without a doubt the answer is YES!

 For what little effort it takes, Signing up with Blog Carnival, maybe a post or two to promote it and Posting Your Carnival, you should see an increase in New Visitors and Page Views from the beginning. People look for Carnivals to join to promote their own Blogs and share the information they write about through them (the carnivals).

This coming Friday will be the 69th Edition of the Working at Home Blog Carnival and I’d like to share some of my experience running a Successful Blog Carnival with you.

Advantages:

• Increased Visits and Page Views. As I mentioned above you should see an increase in these stats from the get go. The more often you run a Carnival the better known it gets, word spreads and the numbers increase even more as time goes on.
• Increased Outgoing Links. You are linking to other blogs (some with higher Page Rank than you) within your given niche. This will help give more authority, at least with your readers, to the quality of information you provide to help them find what they need.
• Incoming Links. There are quite a few participants that will provide a link back in a post of their own in appreciation of being included in your Carnival. At the very least, you will get a trackback from their submission post (as long as they are allowing them). This can help in getting even more new visitors.
• New Resources. Not only are you providing additional information to your readers through the Carnival, but you are also gaining new places to help expand your own expertise in your given niche. You never know what treasures you may find or what relationships can form from a single Blog post.
• You Have Control. Blog Carnival provides you with all the links, categories and commentary the submitter provides. You can accept, deny or mark as spam each individual post. It all depends if you feel it should be included in your Carnival or not. They even include a nice and easy copy/paste code for you or you could use your own format for your Carnival Post.
• They’re Fun. New friends, new info, new ways to look at old things. Always enjoyable and something to look forward to. And regular readers seem to enjoy them too.

Disadvantages:

• Spam. I guess this really goes without saying, but the Spammers even try to submit “articles” into any and all Carnivals. Some are pretty good at disguising their “posts” as real. But, you have to be aware and not be fooled into including them, it could really hurt your reputation.
• Scrapers. Not only do these thieves try to make money using the old “AdSense Blog” format, they use other people’s work to do it. These posts are extremely hard to detect and in most cases you won’t even know unless the Original Author notifies you.
• Time Consuming. One drawback, if it can be called that, is that you really need to read every post that is submitted. In most cases it is well worth the read, but sometimes it feels like a waste of your valuable time, especially when you have to sort out the junk that seems to intrude on your good time.

Some Suggestions:

• Create Folders. Blog Carnival notifies you by e-mail of every article submitted. Sometimes you don’t have to time to go through and read each article right then and there. Create some folders like “Carnival Accepted”, “Carnival Deny”, “Carnival Pending” etc to keep your incoming folder clear and know what you still have to do.
• Give Yourself Time. Make sure that before the Carnival is set to go off, you have enough time to finish reviewing all the submissions beforehand. (I usually set the cutoff for submissions at least 24 hours ahead to give myself time to make sure everything I present is acceptable for the Carnival.) You don’t want something unacceptable getting through.
• Be Consistent. If you plan on presenting your Carnival once a month, once a week or special times throughout the year, make sure your participants know the details of the when. Remember, they have to write a post in time to be included. So, even if you have to remind them of the day or date, they have an idea of the when.

I am far from an expert on running Blog Carnivals, but I know what has worked for me in this particular niche for a decent amount of time. You may consider starting your own Carnival sometime and I hope this gives you some insight into what you have to look forward to.

Have you tried a Carnival? What was your experience? Can you add anything that I might have missed on running a Carnival?

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January 23rd, 2008 at 06:14am | Posted by Joe | Blogging, Carnivals, Promotion | 1 reader remark | Print This Post