Try scheduling hosts in advance
Managing April 29th, 2008
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 over the next couple of weeks who to have. The schedule is then ready to go for three months, and it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there.
My Carnival of Debt Reduction isn’t quite so big yet but here’s what I did the last time:
- I asked for hosts in a forum that is read by a lot of the bloggers in my niche. I received a number of requiests to host just from one post in the Money Blog Network Forums.
- After I assembled a bunch of interested hosts, I sent an e-mail (bcc to all of them) with a tentative schedule that took all of their requests into account.
- As people respond back to me, the hosting schedule takes form.
If your blog carnival has been around for a while then it makes sense to streamline how you set up your hosting schedule.
5 ways to promote your blog carnival when you host
Hosting April 2nd, 2008
Here are a few tips on promoting your edition of a blog carnival that you’ve slaved away at:
- Ask the bloggers who submitted articles to share the carnival with their readers. This probably is only fair, and some carnival managers are requiring that submitters link back to the carnival or run the risk of being blacklisted.
- Use any trackbacks you’re given and find the ones that you’re not. Trackbacks are similar to permalinks but they are used to automatically post a comment linking from the trackback link’s post to the site that initiated the trackback. This places a few links back to the carnival on the submitting bloggers’ posts.
- Use StumbleUpon to bring some juice to the carnival. If you think that Stumbling your own posts is shady, then try this: Stumble your Editor’s Picks, and then let those bloggers know that you’ve done this and ask them to Stumble the carnival for you. This way it looks more natural.
- Use social networking avenues like Twitter, Del.icio.us, etc. to announce the carnival.
- Ping the BlogCarnival.com sidebar widget. Quite a few bloggers have a running list of posted carnivals on their sidebar. Pinging this service will display the link there and might send you some traffic.
