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!

Organizers of some of the more established carnivals are asking their hosts to feature the best posts they receive.  This is in an effort to help separate the cream from the crop and add some impact to the carnival.

Tricia over at Blogging Away Debt had a neat way to feature her favorite posts for this week’s Festival of Frugality:  She orgainzed several “Best” posts according to topic.  As in:

• Best frugal way to keep the kids occupied this summer for this post
• Best pictorial of frugality in action for this post
• Best myth debunker for this post

And of course, there was a

• Best of show for this post

This is a neat way to add a little flair to the posts that stand above the crowd.

There are many good ways to get your carnival to stand out if you’re the host.  Typically the inventiveness is evident in the presentation of the posts.  But what about adding a well-thought-out introduction to the carnival?

Most of the carnivals I’ve hosted just say something to the extent of:

“Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Crustaceans!  It was a pleasure to read everyone’s shrimp-tastic entries!  We’re going to get started now, so do the rock lobster and don’t get crabby …”

And that’s it.  It’s a perfectly functional introduction — short and to the point — but not much else.

This week’s Carnival of Debt Reduction over at Money, Matter, and More Musings had an exceptionally good introduction to the Carnival.  The kind of introduction where you actually learn something!  I’m hard-pressed to tell whether this is the icing on the cake, or whether it should be part of the cake.  One might say that it takes some of the focus off of the posts, but the richer content will certainly draw better search engine traffic and will likely generate a little more buzz than a plain-vanilla introduction.

The other thing that’s nice about this kind of carnival embellishment is that the presentation of the posts are still as clear as they would be in an InstaCarnival:  “So-and-so from such-and-such blog presents A Really Great Post, saying Something Clever.”  Nothing in this carnival has obfuscated the posts.

One more trick to add to your bag for hosting carnivals!