Hippo Web Solutions

Participating in Bog Carnivals is a great way to increase your exposure in the blogoshpere. The main benefits you get are:

• a few more backlinks to your site for free (proper follow links too, not the less useful nofollow variety)
• referral traffic from the carnival itself
• networking opportunities with other proactive bloggers

If you’re a blogger keen to develop your readership, those are all essential things you should be aiming to do at every opportunity! They all directly and indirectly lead to increased traffic to your site (more on that later).

What exactly is a Blog Carnival?

When I first came across this term, I found it a bit confusing, and consequently thought “sounds complicated – I’ll come back to that later”. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Here’s how Blog Carnival defines it:

A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.

To be honest, I still find that a bit confusing. My definition is more along the lines of:

A Blog Carnival is a special kind of blog post in which the author solicits submissions from other bloggers about a particular topic, and publishes a link round-up post which includes links to those posts that meet the criteria.

Often, an example is the best way to understand a concept, so check out some of these carnivals that have recently featured some of my articles (thanks guys):

• Blogger’s Guide
• That’s Blog
• WordPress blogging guide
• Tactical Execution

Can anyone join?

I always thought you had to be well-known or belong to some special club to participate in carnivals, but the truth is that anyone can submit articles for inclusion in a carnival. The only pre-requisite is being a blogger and having written a post that meets the submission guidelines. Different carnivals focus on different topics and have different guidelines, so you should be able to find at least a handful of potential ones to participate in. Carnival hosts (ie the blog which compiles the carnival post) retain editorial control over what gets published, so there is no guarantee your post will make the cut, but if you submit only your best content, chances are it will.

How do I submit an article?

It’s really very simple – just follow these steps:

1. Find a carnival that’s somehow related to your blog’s topic
2. Check out a previous carnival post
3. Fill out the submission form

Step 1: Find a carnival related to your blog’s topic

You’ll find a long list of available carnivals at Blog Carnival, along with details of when the next edition is. Some carnivals in the list will be dormant, so I tend to only choose ones that list an upcoming edition in the next few weeks. From this list you can click through to a carnival’s home page to find out more information on the submission guidelines etc.

Step 2: Check out a previous carnival post

This is optional, but if you feel the carnival is a good fit for your blog, go and check out the latest edition, which is accessible from the carnival’s home page. This’ll give you a feel for the kind of articles that are being accepted.

Step 3: Fill out the submission form

Follow the Submit an article link near the bottom of the carnival’s home page, which will bring up the following:

It’s fairly self-explanatory, so I won’t go into too much detail about filling in the form. One piece of advice which I will give is to fill in a sentence or two in the Remarks field – this is normally displayed verbatim in the carnival post, and can help to lend your submission a little weight so it stands out from the rest. Don’t overdo it though, or the host may decide to chop it.

More on the traffic benefits of Blog Carnivals

Here are some of the ways those carnival links help your blog:

Each link that points back to your site is a way for new visitors to find you. Depending on the popularity of the carnival host, this could mean many or just a few extra visitors to your site.

Each link boosts your search-engine profile. Even if no visitors come to you directly via the carnival post, the extra link adds to your site’s importance in the eyes of the search engines, and consequently your posts will rise in the results when people do searches. Again, the degree to which this happens has a lot to do with the PageRank of the carnival host.

Carnivals are great networking opportunities. Think about it for a second: you submit your article to a blog carnival as a proactive way of drawing others to your site. The same goes for the other participants. Add to this the fact that each carnival is focussed on a particular topic, and you’ve got a great way to forge relationships with other like-minded individuals.

Forge relationships with other bloggers

I encourage you to read some of the other submissions to the carnival, especially those that appear to address a similar audience and themes as your own blog. If you feel you can add something to any of those posts, leave a comment or two. At the very least the other blogger is likely to visit your site to see who’s been visiting, and there’s a chance they may comment on one of your posts. And as they say “one thing leads to another…”.

This, to the best of my knowledge is the heart of successful blogging. Content is king alright, but if you don’t engage with others in the blogging community, you will never build a very substantial traffic base.

Agree? Disagree? Please share your views in the comments section below.

Related posts:

1. All backlinks are created equal…not!
2. Increase traffic to your blog with Social Bookmarking