Easy themes your blog carnival
Hosting August 22nd, 2008
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 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.
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.
Dealing with spammy submissions
Hosting, Managing February 3rd, 2008
As a blog carnival gets more popular, the number of submissions goes up, and the traffic the carnival gets goes up as well. This is good. Unfortunately, this popularity also attracts posts that are of marginal quality or are highly commercial. Or, people will submit several posts to a single edition of the carnival. Spammy is a good word to describe these posts and these submitters.
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.
How effective is this carnival for anyone?
Commentary, For New Carnivals, Hosting October 20th, 2007
I was catching up with the blogs in my reader and ran across this Carnival of Future Millionaires in my reader. It was posted this week, and honestly I had forgotten that I had. (I did not receive an e-mail from the host asking me to link back to the carnival.)
Some things to note about this particular carnival:
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.