Build Traffic to Blog

In the previous article in this series, I reviewed what blog carnivals are and why all aspiring bloggers should be participating in them. In the event that you missed that post, let me recap briefly the advantages to participating in blog carnivals:

• They improve your authority
• You immediately gain regular, profitable readers of your partner blogs
• You get an immediate surge of traffic to blog articles
• You get a long term increase in search result rankings

What I’d like to review in this post is how you can get the most benefit out of your carnival participation. Let’s be real, carnivals take effort and time, so you might as well get the most benefit and good will from them as you can. Here’s how you can do just that:

1) Add your articles early. There will be a call for entries deadline, but in all likelihood the host already has some idea about how the article will be structured before the deadline, so you want your article submitted during this formative stage.

2) Make the host’s job easy: Learn how to create blog article titles that are catchy, and come up with two or three strong, compelling headlines that can be used for the anchor text in links. Good headings are difficult to craft, so craft them yourself. You’ll save the host the trouble and get more visitors from a better headline.

3) Follow the submission guidelines.

4) Get organized: Organize the information you submit. Include your e-mail address, name, blog name, article title, article summary, several sample headings, trackback URL, and permalink. Place this information in an e-mail above the full post itself, unless otherwise directed.

5) Advertise: Once submitted, make sure to advertise the carnival. What goes around comes around, and your aggregate efforts to attract traffic will payoff for all of you in the long run. That’s the concept behind these carnivals: all participants are sharing readers, giving each the opportunity to attract the others’ regular readers.

6) Make sure your blog can handle your visitors: Ready your blog for any traffic spikes that might occur, and optimize the page that the carnival readers will be viewing. You’ll want to target the offers or ads to your audience, provide a very visible subscription link, and follow-up with at least a week’s worth of powerful articles to capitalize on any repeat traffic you might have.

Blog carnivals are a great way to attract profitable, relevant, qualified, long-term readers. Use them correctly and you’ll reap the rewards. But you must be prepared to put your best foot forward. Pick up a good blogs how to if you have any doubts on how you can optimize your blog for this kind of traffic.

Good luck!

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs how to, how to blog, how to create blog, promote blog, traffic to blog

Let me just say that I’m a huge believer of blog carnivals. Of course, they’re not without their disadvantages, but the benefits completely outweigh the investment of time and effort that you give them.

That’s why it amazes me that blog carnivals aren’t more widely used. Granted, the first couple times that you participate in them, it might take you some extra time to learn how things work. And new carnival networks can sometimes be more unreliable than you would like. But get hooked up with a solid group of bloggers in your niche, and carnivals are excellent ways to:

• Improve your credibility
• Quickly get regular, profitable subscribers of your partner blogs
• Get an immediate boost of traffic to blog entries
• Get a longer term improvement in search engine rankings

Carnivals: Just the Facts

A blog carnival is an online event consisting of a loose partnership of bloggers writing about a predefined topic. The posts created (or linked to) during a carnival frequently resulting in a magazine-like format. The carnival has a theme, title, editors, writers, and consumers. Most carnivals are held on a regular basis with rotating hosts.

A carnival usually has an owner, who is the organizer of the overall carnival, deciding or collaborating on converns like frequency, rules, editorial guidelines, how to blog in the carnival, and such. The owner also acts as the coordinator, determining the hosting schedule for the carnival.

Every carnival has one host, and the host’s blog is where all the blog posts for that specific carnival are held. In reply to the call for submissions, each blogger participating in the carnival sends their post to the host, where it is reviewed, edited, and published in the host blog as one giant post (link bait) or a series of posts. Obviously, you should know how to create blog posts that are effective and compelling to get the maximum benefit.

Carnivals usually draw loads of relevant traffic, so bloggers participating in the carnival receive a powerful one-way link from the host and the immediate traffic boost associated with the initial readers. The carnival host gets links from each of the member bloggers who have teamed together to publicize the carnival, knowing that the better the carnival is, the more powerful the links will be when it comes time for them to host.

Now that you know what a carnival is, we’ll discuss how you can get the most out of your carnival participation . . . in our next post!

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs how to, how to blog, how to create blog, promote blog, traffic to blog