Increase Your Subscriber Count and More by Joining Blog Carnivals

I’ve been joining blog carnivals recently, and right now my article is being featured in one: How to Make Money Doing What You Love Carnival. Do you know why? Blog Carnivals have the power to help your blog in many ways. It will give your blog exposure to more audience, new subscribers, traffic, that much needed deep link to one of your articles, and increased ranking in both Google and Technorati. Of course, how it will affect your blog depends on how much time and effort you invest in it. To learn exactly how to get more from blog carnivals, just read on.

What’s a blog carnival?

To those who haven’t heard of the term yet, a blog carnival is a particular kind of blog community where permalinks (or links) to posts of blogs are submitted, collected, and published at a specific date. The posts submitted are usually based on a certain topic or theme. The host of a carnival publishes the collected links with its title, author and description in his/her blog on the specified date of its publishing (usually the deadline of submissions). To get a better idea of what a blog carnival is really about, take a look at blog carnival’s FAQs.

How to join blog carnivals?

Blog carnivals don’t require registration. All you need is a link to the post that you have published already and an email where you’ll receive a form that says you’ve submitted a post to this carnival and the details of the said carnival.

blog carnival email receipt

The only thing you have to do is fill-up the information needed for your link to be published properly.

blog carnival form

One thing to remember also is to submit your desired post/s to the appropriate carnival to avoid having your submission declined. From what I’ve read, since I’m fairly new to this thing, there are some carnivals that are strict about their submission policies and stuff so there will be times when your submissions will be revoked for some valid reasons. But I believe there will be more carnivals that’ll gladly accept your submissions, so don’t lose heart.

You can browse for the right carnival for your blog posts in Blog Carnival. Alternatively, if you’re lucky to spot one, some blogs announce a call for submissions to their upcoming carnival edition. Usually, they provide a link to where you can submit your posts. If not, you can still find it in Blog Carnival through patient browsing of their numerous carnivals, which you could sort by categories and date of editions by the way.

Benefits from joining a blog carnival

One way backlinks – Blog carnivals are made of compiled lists of link submissions from different bloggers; so, definitely, once it’s published, a backlink to your article (or should I call deep link) will be there. One way backlinks, most importantly deep links, will greatly benefit your blog in terms of search engine, Technorati, and Alexa rankings.

Boost in rankings – a backlink coming from one carnival is like a touch of gold for you simply because search engines, Technorati, and Alexa rank your blog based on the number of quality sites linking to it, the higher the PR the better. Now, most of these guys holding and hosting carnivals have decent PRs too. What do you think will happen if you’ve made lots of submissions to different carnivals?

Traffic – I’d like to say “boost your traffic” but basically it all depends on the marketing and popularity of the carnival plus your post headline’s catchiness which will determine how much traffic your blog will receive. Most definitely, though, you’ll be guaranteed traffic even how small it is once your link comes up in the carnival. To guarantee the carnival’s success, help promote it by submitting it to social media sites, e-mailing your friends and contacts about it, and promoting it in your blog as well.

One interesting aspect about blog carnivals is that, like other blog posts, they are indexed by search engines. Now, depending on their link popularity and keyword optimization, they will show up in search results every now and then. What this means is that they can still provide traffic even after they were published. However, it will not be as many as the week it was published.

More subscribers – Generally, traffic coming from the carnival are those who got curious about your submission and decided to take a peek at what you have to offer. If they like what they found in your blog, then it’s guaranteed that they will subscribe or get back every now and then to check on your blog. To take advantage of this traffic, make it easy for them to subscribe and always make quality posts as much as possible.

Tips on maximizing your benefits from your submission

1) Submit to the right carnival. It should be obvious that if your post is about blogging, submit it to blogging related carnivals. Submitting it to cooking carnivals will not get it posted. Also, the more appropriate the carnival to your post, the more its audience will find your blog interesting.

2) Submit to carnivals at least once a week. Your steady submissions will give you better traffic from all of the carnivals you’ve participated in and better rankings because of them also. Take advantage of this free marketing tool to expose your unknown blog to a wider set of audience.

3) Submit your best or pillar articles. It’s always up to you, but if you want to get better impression and acceptance from other people, it’s normal to always put your best foot forward. By submitting your masterpieces, they will get a better idea of what kind of content they can expect from you and what you’re interested in blogging about.

4) Get one catchy title. You should have done this early on when you published your post, but in case you haven’t it’s best to change it in a way that other people will more likely click it. You might not see its text field in the submission form early on, but after providing your permalink it will appear containing your post’s original title. You can manipulate it from here. Of course, your choices of catchy words should revolve around what your post is all about. Don’t make up “über” titles that’re completely different from what’s originally provided. Like in well-known social-bookmarking sites like digg, reddit, and stumbleupon, people will get mad at you if you do that.

5) Provide a short summary for your post. Hosts always include the summary of the post you’re submitting along with your link. This summary will provide your potential readers what you could offer in your post. It’s always better to provide one so you can use it to market your post effectively.

6) Get your posts in early. I got the idea from this article; “Best Practices for Driving Traffic with Blog Carnivals”. Usually, carnival hosts will post in the order that they receive the submissions. This will give you a fair advantage since the earlier your submission goes in, the higher your link will be positioned in the list, and thus more people would possibly pay attention and click it. Alternatively, hosts will be more likely to read and review ( and give a thumbs up) your post if it's in early as compared to the posts they receive an hour before the carnival deadline.

7) Promote the blog carnival. It’s a lesser known rule of thumb in blogging to promote those sites that link to you except spam. Why? Because the more these sites or pages get popular, the more PR juice and visitors you could get from it. Blog carnivals are one of those sites. You can start by sending it to digg, stumbleupon, reddit, delicious, and several other social bookmarking sites. Post about it in your blog. E-mail it to your contacts and friends. It all depends on where you can promote it effectively.

8) Make it easy to subscribe to your blog. Turn your visitors into regular readers by placing your subscribe button where they can immediately see it. You can also optimize your theme where they can see your best posts to better convince them to subscribe to your blog.

That’s it. Blog carnivals can do a lot to your blog, especially if you’re a beginner or interested in making more traffic. Only, you need to be focused and serious about it and, of course, pay attention to these tips and/or learn your way to better blog carnival submissions.



technorati tags: blog carnival, blogging, tips

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