In the earlier article in this series, I discussed what blog carnivals are and why all new bloggers should be participating in them. In the event that you missed that post, let me review briefly the benefits of participating in blog carnivals:

• They increase your authority
• You immediately gain profitable, regular subscribers of your partner blogs
• You get a quick boost of traffic to blog entries
• You get a longer term increase in search result rankings

What I want to cover in this post is how you can get the most benefit out of your carnival participation. Let’s be real, carnivals require effort and time, so you should get as much good will and benefit from them as you can. Here’s how you can do just that:

1) Contribute your articles early. There will be a call for entries deadline, but it’s likely that the host already has a good idea about how the post will be structured before the deadline, so you want your article submitted during this formative stage.

2) Make the host’s job easier: Learn how to create blog article titles that are compelling, and come up with two or three powerful, compelling headings that can be used for the anchor text in links. Good titles are difficult to craft, so create them on your own. You’ll save the host the effort and get more traffic from a more powerful headline.

3) Follow the submission guidelines.

4) Get organized: Organize the information you submit. Include your name, e-mail address, blog name, article title, post summary, several sample headings, permalink, and trackback URL. Place this information in an e-mail above the full article itself, unless told to do otherwise.

5) Promote: Once submitted, make sure to advertise the event. What goes around comes around, and your aggregate efforts to generate traffic will payoff for everyone in the long run. That’s the point of these carnivals: all participants are sharing subscribers, giving each the opportunity to attract the others’ regular subscribers.

6) Make sure you can handle your visitors: Prepare your blog for any traffic spikes that might occur, and optimize the page that the carnival readers will be viewing. You’ll want to aim the offers or ads to your audience, provide a very visible subscribe link, and follow-up with at least a week’s worth of strong articles to capitalize on any repeat traffic you might have.

Blog carnivals are an excellent way to bring qualified, relevant, profitable, long-term readers. Use them correctly and you’ll reap the rewards. But you must be ready to put your best foot forward. Pick up a good blogs how to if you have any doubts on how you can prepare your blog for this kind of traffic.

Good luck!

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Let me start by saying I’m a big fan of blog carnivals. They’re not without their disadvantages, of course, but the benefits completely outweigh the amount of effort and time that you put into them.

That’s why it confounds me that blog carnivals aren’t more widely used. Yes, the first couple times that you participate in them, it will take you some extra time to learn how things work. And new carnival networks can sometimes be more unreliable than you would like. But get hooked up with a reliable group of bloggers in your market, and carnivals are excellent ways to:

• Increase your authority
• Quickly gain regular, profitable subscribers of your partner blogs
• Get a quick boost of traffic to blog entries
• Get a longer term gain in search result rankings

Carnivals: What are They?

A blog carnival is an online event consisting of a group of bloggers writing about a predefined topic. The articles created (or linked to) during a carnival frequently end up looking like a magazine. The carnival has a title, theme, writers, editors, and consumers. Most carnivals are held regularly with rotating hosts.

A carnival usually has an owner, who is the organizer of the overall carnival, collaborating or deciding on converns like rules, frequency, how to blog in the carnival, editorial guidelines, and such. The owner also acts as the coordinator, determining the hosting schedule for the carnival.

Every carnival has a specific host, and the host’s blog is where all the blog posts for that particular carnival are located. In response to the call for submissions, each blogger involved in the carnival submits their post to the host, where it is reviewed, edited, and published in the wild as one giant post (link bait) or a series of smaller posts. Obviously, you had better know how to create blog posts that are effective and compelling to get the maximum benefit.

Carnivals usually draw loads of qualified traffic, so bloggers participating in the carnival get a powerful one-way link from the host and the immediate traffic boost associated with the initial readers. The carnival host gets links from each of the contributing bloggers who have partnered together to publicize the carnival, knowing that the better the carnival is, the more powerful the links will be when it comes time for their turn to host.

Now that you know what a carnival is, we’ll discuss how you can get the most out of your carnival participation . . . in our next post!

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs how to, how to blog, how to create blog, promote blog, traffic to blog

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