If you want to increase traffic to your blog, then you should try participating or even hosting a blog carnival. This is perhaps one of the quickest ways to almost effortlessly increase traffic to your blog. So what is a blog carnival and how do you participate in one?
According to blogcarnival.com, a blog carnival is like a special edition of a magazine with a particular topic, a specific theme and articles from a variety of sources (links to) that all contribute to the overall theme of a particular edition. “Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editor’s opinions or remarks…If you are blogging on that topic, the carnival is the place to share your work with like-minded bloggers.”
A Blog Carnival has an organizer, host, bloggers, and audience.
- The organizer decides what the carnival will be about and how often it will appear.
- The host is the blog where the carnival will appear. Typically the Host collects the submitted articles as well as creates their own comment or reviews to go along with the submissions.
- The bloggers submit articles they have already written relevant to the carnival.
- The Audience consists of readers as well as the organizer, host, and the contributing bloggers. Readers can come to Blog Carnival to find topics that they are interested in. This gives the reader a ton of content on a particular subject without having to search all over the internet for it.
There are several blog carnivals at blogcarnival.com that you can contribute to with the posts you have already posted on your blog that meet the criteria of the carnival. Make sure the post is one that either is already live or will be before the allotted time as set by the Organizer and Host.
Blog carnivals are great ways to create cross traffic for our blog, as well help us integrate quickly into the community. Think about it this way; if someone new to a community pitches right in, in a quiet and helpful manner don’t we want to get to know them? Blog carnivals are similar to jumping right into our new neighborhood's clean-up project. It lets the neighbors all know quickly we are very interested in making our community a better place.