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.

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!

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.

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.

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 way better than a bare list of links.

Here’s how I’ve done it:

• Choose the topic.  Around this past Independence Day I did an American Flag themed Carnival of Personal Finance.
• Go to Wikipedia.  This is often a great place to get general-interest information on a particular topic.  This topic was no exception.
• Read the entry and pick out four or five somewhat connected pieces of information.  Write a few sentences on each piece of information.  (Don’t just cut and paste from the article!)
• If there are images available, great!  If they’re public domain, even better.  That’s how the flags were.  I uploaded them to my server.
• Break up the posts with the themed pieces.  This makes the carnival read a bit more like a story, for a fraction of the effort that it would take to write the entire carnival in story format.
• As an added touch, tie in the theme of the carnival to the e-mail you send to the participating blogs.

Themeing your carnival this way is a low-cost way to get a fair bit more buzz.

• 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.  

It gets annoying after a while.  BlogCarnival.com has enough safeguards that the “spam” is limited, but as of now there’s nothing to prevent someone from going down the line of carnivals and submitting the same post to every single one, or from submitting multiple posts to a single carnival edition.  Here are a few ways to handle these kinds of unwanted submissions:

• Leave it up to the host to use editorial discretion.  This has worked so far with the Carnival of Debt Reduction, but some of the hosts are beginning to complain.  And rightfully so, I suppose.
• E-mail the offending poster and ash him/her to post more normally.
• Ban the offender if the submissions get bad enough or if s/he doesn’t take the hint.
• Move the submission form off site.  The Carnival of Personal Finance did this, and the submissions still seem to be up.  The last time I hosted the spam was pretty moderate if not non-existent.  This might cause a hit in the number of submissions initially, but after a while the posting should get better.

Some things to note about this particular carnival:

• There are 275 posts in the carnival (it’s posted once every four weeks) and nineteen of them were by one author.  Sometimes the Carnival of Debt Reduction doesn’t have 19 posts in the entire thing!
• I didn’t receive any notification that the carnival was up.  As a host, it’s a good thing to ask your submitters to share the carnival with their readers.
• This is clearly a direct cut-and-paste of the InstaCarnival that BlogCarnival.com provides to hosts near the end of the submission period.  Little, if any, editing was done.  The InstaCarnival is a good start but it really looks like an InstaCarnival if that’s all that’s done.
• There’s a lot of white space in between the posts.  This is an artifact of the way the InstaCarnival comes out of the box.
• There are no comments posted on the carnival as of right now, and it’s been up for over three days.  Ouch.

This seems to be an example of “you get out what you put into it.”  Getting the carnival ready to go probably took all of ten minutes, if that:  Log into BlogCarnival (or open up the e-mail with the link to the InstaCarnival), find it, CTRL-A, log into Blogger, New Post, CTRL-C, Publish, done.  But, it looks like the blogger spent all of ten minutes on it, too.

This edition of the carnival is really of minimal use to anyone involved.  It’s not really useful to the host, because no one has even commented on it.  It’s not useful to the people who submitted because their links are buried amongst nearly 300 others, many of which look like some authors submitted everything they ever wrote to that carnival.  And it’s non really useful to the readers because it’s not at all engaging.

I have said before that InstaCarnivals do serve a purpose and that they can bring lots of traffic for little work.  I might amend that a little by saying that InstaCarnivals can bring a lot of traffic if they’re already popular.  The carnival in question here is a new carnival, so it doesn’t have its audience built up.  Unfortunately, InstaCarnivals are not the way to build up a lot of traffic.

I hope How to Make a Million Dollars (the only host of this carnival so far) dresses up the next one a little bit.

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.

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!