Getting your readers to think about the posts
For Popular Carnivals, Hosting September 28th, 2007
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. 
Theme your blog carnival to get readers to stay
Hosting August 2nd, 2007
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 and encourage readers to click through. Putting more effort into the carnivals draws more traffic because of the buzz factor.
Grouping the posts into different “sections” like listening to your heartbeat, getting rest, getting exercise, diet, and so forth, probably means reading a majority of the posts, or at least pondering the titles of the posts, before writing much of anything in the carnival post. I know from my own experience hosting carnivals that a good chunk of the submissions come in on the 11th hour — heck, that’s when I submit a lot of mine! So likely a lot of this writing was done under a little bit of time pressure.
Congratulations on a great 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 the Carnival of Personal Finance started up, the philosophy was to try to include everyone who submitted a post. The idea was to encourage participation, create something that was greater than the sum of its parts, and create a collaborative, cooperative environment for personal finance bloggers. Not that Flexo has lost his sense of community now that over 100 editions have been posted and his carnival has become the target of more and more spammy posts, but he’s begun to ask more of the posters and also of the hosters.
A similar set of guidelines were put out by the manager of the Carnival of the Capitalists when I guest-hosted. This is also a large carnival. The management here comes in the form of a detailed page on the CotC blog.
Having some rules when the carnivals get large adds some structure and keeps the hosts from getting too overwhelmed. (The recent host of the Carnival of Personal Finance asked for more posts over at the MBN Forums so apparently some folks aren’t overwhelmed easily!) However, the rules are an additional burden on the hosts and can deter them from signing on.
Where’s the “sweet spot” for how much to manage a carnival?
The Carnival of Debt Reduction hasn’t quite gotten to the mega-carnival stage but I still get questions from the hosts about which posts to include. Basically my instructions to the hosts are to use their judgment and that I’ll support them. I’d probably hold off instituting a lot of rules as long as possible (basically until I can’t) because I’m not really big on rules in general. But if it gets to the point that the hosts start feeling overwhelmed then I might not have much choice. As far as having a “best of” section, how to order the posts in the carnival, what posts to reject, how to present the carnival, how to handle people who don’t link back, etc., leaving many of these decisions up to the host allows the individual nature of the host to come out more.
So here are some tests to see if you need more regulation in your carnival:
- Are there lots of off-topic posts submitted? Then define the topic better or give authority to the hosts to nix off-topic posts.
- Are submitters being lazy linking back? Then start keeping a list of the worst offenders.
- Are the hosts starting to cave in under the load? Then it might be time to start restricting the size, or otherwise make things a little easier for the hosts. Or at the very least define what hosts are to do a little more. (Without hosts, carnivals can be a lot of work!)
Carnival of Personal Finance cutting the BlogCarnival.com cord?
Commentary July 31st, 2007
Last week when I tried to submit my article to the Carnival of Personal Finance over at BlogCarnival.com, I found out that this carnival was “inactive.” At one point the carnival I manage, the Carnival of Debt Reduction, was in danger of becoming inactive over there because I hadn’t updated the hosting list in a while. That is, the carnival wasn’t really inactive — just that BlogCarnival.com hadn’t seen any activity from the maintainer, me.
Flexo, maintainer of the Carnival of Personal Finance, had been making some rumblings about getting away from BlogCarnival.com and using his own submission form, which is here. This form had been up for months, but I had been holding out and using the BlogCarnival.com form because it filled in more of the information for me and was a little faster. But this ease of use was the same reason why lots of irrelevant and spammy articles got through. This was the main reason, I think, that Flexo wanted people to stop using that form and start using his.
For the popular carnivals, spamming is likely becoming an issue, because popular carnivals are, well, popular, and therefore posts that make it in get quite a bit of traffic. So they’re targets for lots of free links by everyone and their brother.
Going “off the grid” like Flexo may have done might kill smaller carnivals. BlogCarnival.com does provide a lot of oxygen to newer carnivals because it is a sort of hub, and, spam or no spam, it’s a traffic source that’s hard to ignore. I guess removing this kind of dependency is a sign of growing up.