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!

• Theme your blog carnival to get readers to stay The 83rd Carnival of Homeschooling, featured on the homepage of BlogCarnival.com, wrapped the posts up in a check-up theme.  This was very effective and made the carnival a pleasure to read.Bulletized lists are all right, and they serve their purpose, which is to provide links to the on-topic submitted articles......
• Does it pay to be clever as a host? Putting together a carnival can take anywhere from about five minutes to many, many hours.The five minute version takes advantage of the "InstaCarnival" feature on BlogCarnival.com. The InstaCarnival is a post that has a number of lines with the format:Blogger presents blog post, posted at blog, saying "comment"for each post......
• 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......
• How tightly does one need to control a carnival? As blog carnivals get big and well-established, the traffic gets pretty substantial.  This attracts more posts, both good and bad.  The good posts, because it's a good, long-standing carnival that bloggers want to submit to.  The bad posts, because it's an easy, high-traffic link for not that much work.Initially, when......

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