Screen the submissions with clear rules
Hosting, Managing September 16th, 2009
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 decided to cut the cord over there. That reduced the volume quite a bit, and the folks that were submitting on-topic articles already knew about the blog carnival submission form on my site.
I decided to take things a step further and make it very clear what was to be expected of people submitting to the carnival. I drafted a set of blog carnival rules and added a check box on the submission form that indicated that they accepted the rules. The rules could be used as screens by the hosts. Don’t follow the rules, and it’s an easy rejection. It makes the host’s job much easier, which is a good thing for a carnival manager.
What I regret it that I didn’t do this a long time ago. My aunt, who was a health teacher, always said that it’s far easier to be strict at the beginning than it is to get stricter later. The Best of Money Carnival started things off on the right foot with very clear rules. Hosting that carnival was a breeze, and I hope that hosts of my carnival find it just as easy.
Consider choosing quality over quantity
Hosting July 7th, 2009
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 the best host of the year, plus ten automatic entries into his wildly popular Personal Finance March Madness competition.
This is refreshing. A lot of blog carnivals are becoming nothing more than link dumps. Hosts have had it, and managers have had it.
Some of the advantages of a limited-post, quality-based carnival:
- Filtering. The host has filtered out the riff-raff and the mediocre.
- More traffic for those accepted. Being one of ten posts is better than being one of a hundred.
- Less wasted time. You may miss a few good posts that didn’t quite make the cut, but it’s unlikely that you’ll sit through any bad ones.
- Self-selecting. After getting turned down a dozen times, spammers might turn to greener pastures.
- Construction of the carnival is easier and faster. Less typing.
If your niche is being overrun with link-dump carnivals, consider starting your own Best Of carnival!
Theme your carnival with unusual holidays
Hosting February 24th, 2009
Writer’s block can come at the worst possible moment, like when it’s your turn to host a carnival. You really want to get away from the InstaCarnival deal and do something special, but what?
Check out Holiday Insights. They have a big list of unusual holidays. I had no idea that today, February 24th, is National Tortilla Chip Day. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. Think you could theme your carnival around the humble tortilla chip? A Doritos® extravaganza? Or maybe just a bunch of corny jokes?
This is a way to do something a little unexpected for your carnival.
An unfortunate reality of hosting a blog carnival
Commentary, Hosting September 6th, 2008
The larger benefit goes to the people who submit to the carnivals rather than to the people who put forth all of the effort to host them.
A number of bloggers I respect have figured this out already, and they’re fairly reluctant to host a carnival anymore.
They understand the benefit of regular submission to blog carnivals: free backlinks.
The host gets a few things out of the carnival, mainly a little bit of traffic over the course of the week that they host the carnival, and a bit of exposure for their blog. The people who submit to the carnival get a permanent benefit of a backlink that usually means an incremental amount of SEO benefit. If their post is really good, they may get additional traffic if the host makes that post an editor’s pick, but that is small compared to the long-term benefit of the backlink.
I see hosting as becoming more of a small blog’s game, and this is unfortunate. My main blog is reasonably old by personal finance blog standards, but I’ve gotten on board to host a number of carnivals over the next three months or so. Some of my colleagues who have gotten a bit bigger than myself (currently at 3,000 subscribers) seem content to submit to several carnivals, sometimes with posts from several of their blogs, and rarely host any on their main blogs anymore. And, frankly, I don’t blame them! That’s the smart way to game the blog carnival system.
Some carnivals strongly encourage backlinks to the carnival from participating blogs; others require it. I applaud those who require backlinks as a contingency for participation in future carnivals, mainly for the reason that it keeps the hosts from feeling like they’re being used too badly.
I still have some interest from people who want to host the Carnival of Debt Reduction but for some reason it seems to be a little bit harder to get people to step forward than it used to be. Maybe folks who host the carnivals see the diminishing return for the effort they put out.
This seems to be an issue that carnival managers need to take on. Some managers have implemented a "terms and conditions" clause in submitting to their carnival in order to establish some accountability for linking back. For managers reliant on BlogCarnival.com like myself, the best we can do at the moment is to add a clause in the submission instructions.
A key ingredient of blog carnivals is the hosts, and convincing potential hosts of a carnival of the benefits of hosting is getting more difficult. It’s necessary to put measures in place to keep people from taking advantage of the hosts too badly.