Drive More Traffic To Your Website Using Blog Carnival

Posted in Blogging, Tips, Web Design • 548 days ago • Written by Ryan Taft • 7 Comments

Are you looking for new ways to drive more traffic to your website? Having a blog is a great tool for keeping readers interested in your site and continuing to return week after week. Creating new blog content on a regular basis is great for SEO, but there are additional things that you can do to drive even more traffic to your blog/website. Using Blog Carnivals can help you attract new readers to your website. In this article we will explain what blog carnivals are, how they can be used to drive traffic to your website, how to submit articles to blog carnivals, and how to create your own blog carnival.

What is a Blog Carnival?

Blog Carnivals are the compilation of blog articles on a specific topic.

• Blog Carnivals Author(s) – Blog Carnivals setup and run by an individual or team of individuals,
• Blog Carnival Writers – This is you! Anyone can submit blog articles (relevant to the topic of the carnival) to the author of the carnival. At set intervals (weekly, monthly, etc.) a carnival is published to its audience.
• Blog Carnival Readers – Readers can subscribe to a blog carnival much like you’d subscribe to an email mailing list or RSS feed. This ensures that you will have access to all new carnivals published within the topic that you subscribed to.

A blog carnival usually comes in the form of a blog article with a list of links to all of the articles submitted within the topic. Blog carnivals are great tools for driving more traffic to your website as each time you write a new blog article you can submit it to relevant carnivals. Those carnivals are then published to readers who will click on links to your blog articles to read your content.

Blog Carnival Topics

Blog carnivals come in all shapes and sizes… what that means is that there are so many different blog carnival topics that you’re bound to find a few that make sense for your web content. If you don’t find a blog carnival suited for your blog content, you can always author a new Blog Carnival, but that’s a topic for another day. Let’s review some of the most popular blog carnival topics that might be of interest to you:

• Fitness & Health
• Travel Guide
• Make Money Blogging
• Stress Response
• Selling Products Online
• Social Media Marketing Tools
• Pilates Fitness
• Black History Month
• Building Custom Websites
• Self Improvement
• Celebrity Gossip
• Just for Weddings
• Green Gardening
• Guide for Financing & Saving
• Personal Development
• Aquatic Therapy
• Dealing with Teenagers
• Art History
• Bankruptcy Counseling
• Pregnancy Tips
• Internet Marketing
• Boomers & Seniors News You Can Use

As you can see from the list above, there are many different blog carnival topics and this list doesn’t even scratch the surface of what’s out there. Now that you know there’s one, or many, blog carnivals out there covering a similar topic to what your website is about, now let’s dig into how you can sign-up to use blog carnivals.

Benefits of Using Blog Carnivals

Using blog carnivals can be an effective way for you to achieve some of your website goals. Below is a list of the benefits to using blog carnivals:

• Attracts new visitors to your website
• Increases your overall website traffic
• Creates inbound links to your blog articles
• Increases the chance of your content going viral
• Provides an opportunity to build relationships with blog carnival authors
• Might help you increase your RSS subscribers

If you’re looking to accomplish some of the things above then blog carnivals are a great tool for you to use.

Searching for Relevant Blog Carnival Topics

With so many different carnivals to choose from, searching for relevant blog carnival topics for your website can be time-consuming. Let’s take a look at a few different ways to make searching for relevant blog carnivals a little easier. To get started, be sure to log into BlogCarnival.com and click ‘Browse all Carnivals’ on the left navigation bar.

Search Blog Carnivals by Category

Perhaps the easiest way to find the best blog carnivals for your website is to search by Category. To search blog carnivals by Category simply select the drop-down list at the top of the ‘Browse all Carnivals’ page and select the Category that makes the most sense for your web content. Once selected a list of blog carnivals within that Category will populate below.

Search Blog Carnivals by Keyword

Another great way to find relevant blog carnivals which match your website content is to search by Keyword. Simply type a Keyword or Phrase into the text bar next to ‘Search by Keyword’. Hit ‘Enter’ on your keyboard when you’re finished typing in your keyword and a list of blog carnivals matching that keyword or phrase will populate in the results below.

Search Blog Carnivals by Sorting by Next Edition

One of the most effective ways to search for blog carnivals is to ‘Sort by Next Edition’. Even if you utilize the ‘Category’ or ‘Keyword’ options listed above, it still makes sense to ‘Sort by Next Edition’. When you ‘Sort by Next Edition’ all of the blog carnivals that will be getting released in the near future move to the top of the list. Not all carnivals are published weekly, so it makes sense to always ‘Sort by Next Edition’ so that you can find all of the blog carnivals that are scheduled to be released sooner rather than later.

Pros and Cons to Creating & Managing Your Own Blog Carnival

If you cannot find any relevant blog carnivals that get published on a regular basis, but you still see the value in using blog carnivals to increase your website traffic, than we recommend that you create your very own blog carnival. With that being said, it’s not just creating the blog carnival that you have to think about, it’s managing it as well. Like everything online, there are both pros and cons to creating and managing your own blog carnival. Let’s take some time to explore each.

Pros for Creating & Managing a Blog Carnival

For those of you who are seriously considering creating a blog carnival on a topic that’s relevant to your website topic, we applaud you. There a lot of benefits that come from creating and managing your very own blog carnival. Here are some of the top benefits to creating a blog carnival:

• Creating the blog carnival is a simple process
• You now have a blog carnival that’s relevant to the content you create for your website
• You have the ability to control everything, including what articles to include (from other Writers), timing on when the carnival is released, the promotion of the carnival, etc.
• You can include as many of your own articles within the blog carnival as you’d like
• You’ll have the ability to build relationships with other website owners/bloggers who write about the same topic as you. There could be partnership and cross promotional opportunities that arise.

Cons for Creating & Managing a Blog Carnival

Again, if you’re seriously thinking about creating and managing your own blog carnival, please be aware that there is a downside to doing so. Mostly that downside centers around it being a lot of work on your part, but let’s take a look at what might be seen as a negative to creating and managing a blog carnival:

• Managing the blog carnival on an ongoing basis will take time. Is the opportunity cost of working on managing your blog carnival worth not spending time on something else, such as working on your website?
• You have to sift through a lot of article each time you want to release a new blog carnival, which again takes time.

As you can see, the Pros outweigh the Cons when it comes to creating and managing your own blog carnival. With that said, time is our most precious commodity, and even with all of the benefits you’ll receive from running your own blog carnival, it still won’t make sense for everyone. For those of you who do want to set up your own blog carnival, let’s show you how that’s done.

How Do I Create a Blog Carnival?

Creating a blog carnival is a fairly straightforward process. Follow the steps below and you’ll have your own blog carnival setup in a few minutes.

1. Sign-in to BlogCarnival.com and click ‘My Carnivals’ on the left navigation bar
2. Since you haven’t created a blog carnival before, the page is empty. You have the option to take over the management of an existing blog carnival or create your own. Click ‘add a new one’ in order to create your own blog carnival.
3. Create a Name for your blog carnival
4. Add a Tagline to your blog carnival
5. Provide a Description for your blog carnival – Take some time to think about a well crafted ‘Description’ so that you generate as much interest from prospective Writers as possible.
6. Upload a Logo for your blog carnival (not required)
7. Select a relevant Topic to categorize your blog carnival under
8. Paste in your Homepage URL. This is not required, but some people like to create a separate web page that explains what your carnival is all about.
9. Add a contact E-mail address whereby Writers can contact you about your blog carnival
10. Come up with a Deadline for when submissions should be filed in order to have a chance for inclusion in an upcoming blog carnival release
11. Add any Categories that Writers can select when submitting their articles
12. Click ‘Add’

Setup an Upcoming Release of  Your Blog Carnival

Now that you have created a new blog carnival, for which you’re the author, it’s time to set up a new edition (ie. schedule a new blog carnival to be released and start accepting submissions from other writers). Also, you need to host the blog carnival somewhere. We recommend that you host it on your own blog if it makes sense (which it should since it’s on the same topic as your blog). If not, you can always setup a free WordPress blog to host your blog carnivals. We recommend you put the blog carnival on your website because you will capitalize on all of the traffic from readers blog carnival. Think of each new blog carnival that you release as a new blog article.

Follow the steps below to set up a new edition for your blog carnival:

1. From within your blog carnival web page, click ‘Add a new Carnival Edition’
2. Select ‘Upcoming’ next to ‘This edition is’
3. Set a ‘Submission Deadline’
4. Set a date that this edition of your blog carnival will be published
5. Enter the URL of the site which the blog carnival will be hosted on (ie. your website if you choose to go that route)
6. If you’ve created a blog article explaining your blog carnival or this new edition add that URL in the text box next to ‘Permalink URL’
7. Add any Categories that you might break your blog carnival into
8. Provide a description about this new edition. Use this area to attract Writers to submit articles to your blog carnival.
9. Click ‘Add’
10. Start reviewing articles when they come in from Writers to determine which will make it into this edition of your blog carnival
11. Create the blog carnival as a blog post with links to each article that you decided to include
12. Publish your blog carnival on the scheduled date
13. Go out and promote your blog carnival on social media and within any other marketing channels that you see fit

That’s it! You’re finished. You now have your very own blog carnival with the first edition already published. Now you can sit back and watch the traffic come pouring in!