There are many good ways to get your carnival to stand out if you’re the host.  Typically the inventiveness is evident in the presentation of the posts.  But what about adding a well-thought-out introduction to the carnival?

Most of the carnivals I’ve hosted just say something to the extent of:

“Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Crustaceans!  It was a pleasure to read everyone’s shrimp-tastic entries!  We’re going to get started now, so do the rock lobster and don’t get crabby …”

And that’s it.  It’s a perfectly functional introduction — short and to the point — but not much else.

This week’s Carnival of Debt Reduction over at Money, Matter, and More Musings had an exceptionally good introduction to the Carnival.  The kind of introduction where you actually learn something!  I’m hard-pressed to tell whether this is the icing on the cake, or whether it should be part of the cake.  One might say that it takes some of the focus off of the posts, but the richer content will certainly draw better search engine traffic and will likely generate a little more buzz than a plain-vanilla introduction.

The other thing that’s nice about this kind of carnival embellishment is that the presentation of the posts are still as clear as they would be in an InstaCarnival:  “So-and-so from such-and-such blog presents A Really Great Post, saying Something Clever.”  Nothing in this carnival has obfuscated the posts.

One more trick to add to your bag for hosting carnivals!

• Using the InstaCarnival without making it look like one For those who have hosted blog carnivals in a pinch, it's a big help to have a working template that has all of the posts basically ready to go.  That's what BlogCarnival.com's InstaCarnival is.All of the posts are cast into simple sentences, likeBlogger presents A Really Cool Post over at......
• How effective is this carnival for anyone? I was catching up with the blogs in my reader and ran across this Carnival of Future Millionaires in my reader.  It was posted this week, and honestly I had forgotten that I had.  (I did not receive an e-mail from the host asking me to link back to the......
• Powerful backlink tool, or spammer in a box? One of the sidebar ads within BlogCarnival.com showed a blog carnival submission tool called Xingla Pro 3. Honestly, I thought submitting articles to different blog carnivals was pretty easy, but this tool appears to make it ridiculously easy.  Maybe almost too easy. I asked a question of a guy who......
• Empower your hosts Managing a blog carnival can be really easy if you have great hosts.  Great hosts write inventive posts for the carnivals and help to promote the carnival.  It's their edition of the carnival, so a good reflection on them is a good reflection on you. My Carnival of Debt Reduction......

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