Hosting A Smooth Blogging Carnival

Blogging Carnivals

Blogging Carnivals are an excellent tool for gathering readers from an already established site's readership base.  They are also an excellent tool for the host in gathering content, quality links, and in building trust and respect among your readers.  So it is big win-win endeavor.  If you are the host of a monthly blogging carnival, be sure to provide your participating bloggers with the oppurtunity to succeed in your blogging carnival.

Tips For Helping Your Blogging Carnival Run Smoothly

1. Announce Your Monthly Topic Early - It is important to give your participating bloggers, ample time to construct a quality post for inclusion into your monthly blogging carnivals.  I like to give almost a full month for my participants to develop their posts.  Announcing the topic early has a ton of advantages.  The earlier you set the topic the more likely that other bloggers will have time to work up a post for your carnival.  If you wait until a week before the carnival goes live, then you risk lack of participation due to lack of time.  Also by announcing a week out, you are forcing a lot of posts within your niche on the same topic to appear around the same time.  This can lead to many of those posts being skipped as they are "just another one of those carnival entry posts".  If you announce your topic early, the featured articles can appear throughout your blogging niche for the entire month and prevent a bunch of similar topics going live all across your blog roll simultaneously.
2. Make Your Topic Focused, But Open - Pick a topic that has multiple avenues for discussion.  If you pick a would you A or B type topic, then chances are you are going to have a ton of repeated information across all the participating blogs.  This is poor planning without thinking of the reading experience for visitors.
3. Make Your Link Requirements Fool-Proof - Growing your carnival is much easier, if all participants are linking back to your carnival page.  Some carnivals use an image, while others use text links to promote the carnival on the participants' sites.  If you require linking, be sure to post the code for the proper linking so that it can be simply copied and pasted into the article.  This will save you having to double check each entry and ask for corrections.  Make it easy for your bloggers to add your code.
4. Remind Potential Participants - Some bloggers are very busy and will forget about the approaching deadline for submission.  Be sure to send out friendly reminders as well as tweet reminders with a link to the current topic to your followers.  We are all busy and tend to forget things.  A gentle reminder can help to increase your participation as well as build trust that you genuinely want others to participate.

Keeping Your Special Visitors

Special Visitors

Two of the best ways to get new visitors to your site are from guest posting and participating in blogging carnivals.  Guest posting allows you to get new visitors from an already establish site.  The trust they lend when hosting your post helps to send readers to your site as a vote of approval for you.  After all, they are hosting your post which is a form of promotion.

Blogging carnivals tend to be very popular sources of many viewpoints on a shared topic.  Many times these readers will visit your site and view your carnival submitted post.  If they enjoyed your content for the blogging carnival, there next step may be to review your current post or look at interesting topics in your archives.  Either way you want to keep those special visitors coming back.  You want to convert them into new regular readers and not just a one time visitor that bounces right out of your site after reading your original entry.

How To Keep Them

There are a few things that you can do to help your rate of converting those new special visitors into regular readers or subscribers.  After they become subscribers or regular readers, there are much better chances that you can convert them to customers, if your goal is to market a product of your own or to promote affiliate products.

Here are a few strategies to help convert special visitors into subscribers or regular readers.

1. Make sure you have a top quality post on days that blogging carnivals are released.
2. Have a high quality post on the day your guest post airs on another site.
3. Have an area that showcases your most popular posts so favorite posts can be easily found.
4. Have your newsletter or subscribing option listed above the fold so it is easily seen.
5. Use deep internal links within your submitted carnival and guest post entries.

Anyone have any other strategies for converting your special guests to regular readers?

Blogging Carnivals: What Are The Benefits?

What Is a Blogging Carnival?

A blogging carnival is a collaboration by various bloggers with posts solely dedicated to answering a single question or focused on a single topic.  This topic or question is usually decided by the blogging carnival's host.  The host can be the same for each carnival or can travel between the different participants.  The host collects all of the posts done by participating bloggers and organizes them into one large post with links to each of the individual posts.  I have participated in many blogging carnivals and I must say that they are an excellent way to network within your niche and are amazing at increasing traffic to your site.

Blogging Carnival Benefits

Carnival participants reap the following benefits:

1. A major spike in traffic on carnival days as your host will be sending many readers directly to your entry post.
2. You get exposure to many readers that many never of found their way to your site without the carnival.
3. The increase in traffic results in an increase in subscribers and returning visitors if your content is good.  You should always submit some of your best content to guest posts and blogging carnivals.
4. Blogging carnivals allow you to find others in your niche and assist with networking.
5. Having seen your work on a carnival, other bloggers may be more likely to sponsor a guest post submitted by a fellow carnival participant.
6. Increased traffic means increased potential for monetization via purchases and ads revenue.
7. Backlinks from the host back to your site.

Carnival hosts reap the following benefits:

1. Increased traffic and returning visitors that come back looking for new carnival topic entries.
2. Building page links that link back to your site as many times participants will put a link to your site describing that they are participating in your carnival.
3. Content rich posts from various authors.

I highly recommend that you start out by participating in a blogging carnival to see exactly how they work.  You will reap many benefits that will continue to help increase your traffic and subscribers long after the carnival is over.  Reach out to your fellow blogging carnival participants and get to know them for increased chances of hosting guest posts.  You can get started by doing a search for "blogging carnival" and the niche that you are in.  This should give you a list of carnivals to look into.  Participating in at least one blogging carnival per month should be one of the goals of your blog.

Can you think of any other benefits for either the blogging carnival hosts or participants?

What has your experience been with blogging carnivals?