In the earlier post in this series, I reviewed what blog carnivals are and why all up and coming bloggers should be participating in them. In case you missed that post, let me review quickly the benefits to participating in blog carnivals:

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

What I’m going to review in this post is how you can get the most benefit out of your carnival participation. Let’s face it, carnivals require effort and time, so you might as well get the most benefit and good will from them as possible. Here’s how you can do just that:

1) Add your posts early. There will be a submission deadline, but in all likelihood the host already has some idea on how the post will be structured before the deadline, so you want your article submitted during this early stage.

2) Make the host’s job easy: Learn how to create blog article titles that are clever, and come up with two or three powerful, compelling headings that can be used for the anchor text in links. Good headlines are hard to craft, so create them on your own. You’ll save the host the effort and get more traffic from a more powerful headline.

3) Follow the submission guidelines.

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

5) Promote: Once submitted, be sure to advertise the carnival. What goes around comes around, and your collaborative efforts to generate 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: Prepare your blog for any traffic surges that might occur, and optimize the page that the carnival readers will be viewing. You’ll want to aim the offers or ads to your audience, provide a very conspicuous subscribe link, and follow-up with at least a week’s worth of solid articles to capitalize on any lingering traffic you might have.

Blog carnivals are a terrific way to attract profitable, relevant, qualified, long-term readers. Use them properly and you’ll reap the rewards. But you must be ready 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!

Let me just say that I’m a huge fan of blog carnivals. They’re not without their drawbacks, of course, but the benefits entirely outweigh the investment of time and effort that you put into them.

That’s why it confounds me that blog carnivals aren’t as popular as they should be. Yes, the first few times that you participate in them, it might take you some extra time to learn the ropes. And new carnival networks can sometimes be more unreliable than one would like. But get hooked up with a good group of bloggers in your field, and carnivals are effective ways to:

• Increase your authority
• Immediately get profitable, regular subscribers of your partner blogs
• Get a quick boost of traffic to blog posts
• Get a longer term improvement in search result rankings

Carnivals: Just the Facts

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

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

Each carnival has a specific host, and the host’s blog is where all the blog articles for that particular carnival are held. In reply to the submission call, every blogger participating in the carnival submits 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 smaller posts. Obviously, you’ll need to know how to create blog posts that are effective and compelling to get the most benefit.

Carnivals usually draw loads of qualified traffic, so bloggers participating in the carnival receive a powerful back link from the host and the immediate traffic surge associated with the initial readers. The carnival host receives links from each of the participating bloggers who have teamed together to advertise 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 talk about how you can maximize your carnival participation . . . in our next post!