What exactly is a Blog Carnival?
It is a blogging promotional event that is intended to drive traffic to participating blogs. It is a regularly scheduled blog event about one theme. One type is an article filled with links to other articles on blogs, written on the same subject. It’s like a ‘best-of’ list of the current blog posts on a given topic.
Now, how can being in a Blog Carnival help you?
For instance you submitted your post to a blog carnival and they accepted your post, you can expect not just a quality backlink from an active blog – really valuable, I say. You can also expect some high quality visitors from the carnival. Sometimes visitors will be other blog owners; often they will be readers who have an interest in the topic and both of these are wonderful visitors to have.
You’ll probably ask now, how to start a Blog Carnival?
Here’s how:
Step 1: Select or Choose a Related Topic. Make sure that your topic is closely related to your blog… So people who visit your carnival post will be most likely to click through and read more of your related content.
Well-written, unique posts with a good headline are more likely to be accepted into a carnival, and attract more visitors. So make sure to only submit your best stuff.
Step 2: Brand your Blog Carnival. It’s important to give your blog carnival a name, so all participants refer to it in the same way. You can also create a graphic to help other bloggers publicize their participation and to further boost awareness and recognition.
Step 3: Make or Write your Blog Carnival Post. You definitely can’t have a blog carnival unless you start it with your own blog post. This is the post on your blog that will get all of the incoming link benefits from the blog carnival. As I’ve said make sure it’s a great post, and be sure to update it with links to the other participants’ posts for reciprocal linking (that’s the essence of a blog carnival and what makes it successful).
Step 4: Submit your Carnival to BlogCarnival.com. It is the most commonly-known/popular blog carnival website. You can submit your blog posts on the site. It has all the instructions.
Step 5: Finally, Promote your Blog Carnival. It makes much more sense to promote your blog carnival and to recruit other bloggers to participate to make the carnival successful. You can do this through blogger outreach by emailing other bloggers who could benefit from the “link love” (a blog carnival provides). Or you can announce your carnival on forums related to your blog topic.