Increase Traffic with Blog Carnivals

If you have a blog, then you probably encountered several times the well-known advice that you have to post regularly, in order to keep your audience. You also know some tricks on how to manage this when you also have a job, school, children, or other duties that may prevent you from writing.

There is a tool which was not so much mentioned, but it is worth trying: host a blog carnival. Blog carnivals are regular posts which gather articles on a given topic, submitted by their authors. Here’s how to get a blog carnival up and running:

• 1. Sign up for a free account with BlogCarnival.com
• 2. Browse the list of all existing carnivals and try to find a niche for your future carnival (it is better to be related to your blog’s topic). If you want to get more buzz around your carnival, you could use Technorati or any other tool to see which are the most popular searches.
• 3. Find a good name for your carnival. As there are now more than 1500 carnivals registered, you have some competition here. Try to make it clear from the name what is it about.
• 4. Follow the instructions and set up your carnival (it is very easy and the instructions given on BlogCarnival are precise). Set the limit date of sending the posts one or two days before the publishing date, so you have a time buffer there.
• 5. Promote your carnival: write a post about it, inviting your readers to submit their articles, or tell your friends, or write in forums about it.
• 6. As people submit posts for your blog carnival, you’ll be notified by e-mail. After the submission deadline, you’ll receive an e-mail from BlogCarnival, containing a great tool: InstaCarnival. This is in fact your future post: it contains links to all entries, already HTML formatted, so if you don’t feel like being more creative, you can just copy-paste the content and publish it on your blog.
• 7. After you publish one edition of your blog carnival, go to BlogCarnival.com, mark that edition as published and announce the next one.

If you want to see an example, here’s my blog carnival, 1001 cats, and this is the first edition of 1001 cats published on my blog.

Good luck to all of you, and please let us know when we can submit our entries to your next blog carnival.

This article has been written by guest author Simonne Matthew. She blogs about productivity tools at All Tips And Tricks.