Blunt Money’s take on the Carnival of Personal Finance this week featured a crossword puzzle with words that related to the posts in the carnival.  Very inventive!

With a carnival as popular as the Carnival of Personal Finance it helps to have an extra something to get readers involved in reading the post.  Looking at a list of several dozen or even a hundred posts is overwhelming.  What the crossword accomplished is that it got readers looking at each category in turn.  Looking at a category with maybe ten posts is a whole lot more manageable.  I would imagine that individual articles got more eyeball time than they otherwise might have.

I’m sure there are other ways to structure a carnival so that each category gets a little more “love” from readers.  Your participants will thank you.

• Easy themes your blog carnival Adding a theme to your carnival doesn't have to be difficult.  It can be as easy as looking around you and searching Wikipedia. Interspersing a few interesting facts about a timely topic, regardless of whether that topic is closely tied to the particular blog carnival, dresses it up substantially.  It's......
• Screen the submissions with clear rules If there are no rules for what can be submitted to your blog carnival, then just about anything will be submitted!  The overall quality of posts submitted to the Carnival of Debt Reduction had been going downhill a touch.  Lots of automatic carnival submission was happening through BlogCarnival.com, and I......
• Try scheduling hosts in advance This is a rule that I don't follow all the time, and it adds a lot of stress having to find a host from week to week. The Carnival of Personal Finance has come to ask for hosts quarterly. He asks for hosts about a month in advance, then decides......
• Consider choosing quality over quantity Free Money Finance has started up a new blog carnival that turns its back on quantity.  The Best of Money Carnival, by definition, is limited to only ten posts each week.  FMF even throws in some perqs:  $1,000 donated to charity for the best post of the year and for......

• Random Thoughts and Personal Finance Links I've got lots on my mind this week, so I'm going to skip the introduction. As usual, there are links to personal finance articles that I liked at the end of this post. I was Interviewed by The Slacker Method Trip to Boston - I'm heading to Boston next week......
• Organize Your Personal Finances in No Time by Debbie Stanley If nothing else, the state of the economy has shown that millions of people don’t have a good grasp of how to manage their personal finances. There are hundreds of books written every year on the subject and yet, this concept still seems to elude many. Some books are either......
• First Personal Finance Blog Carnival Participation: Success! I have to say, it's great to be accepted by the personal finance blog community in such a short amount of time.  Yesterday, Stupid Cents was featured in the Money Hacks Carnival #51, hosted by Adam @ Your Money Relationship.  So go check out the other great articles and find......
• Money carnivals for this week Here are some money carnivals for your weekend reading pleasure:Carnival of Personal Finance, superheroes edition.  Well done.Carnival of Debt Reduction from Money Matters for Life.Carnival of Taxes over at Don't Mess with Taxes.Festival of Frugality, Ten Commandments edition.  Also well done!Carnival of Investing at the Binary Dollar.  Nice commentary.Carnival of......