On the first part of this series we covered how you can generate traffic to your website via Web Design and CSS galleries. On the this second part I want to cover one of the most basic traffic generation methods for bloggers: Blog Carnivals. (By the way, this will be a long series. The basic stuff is coming first, but soon we’ll have more salty techniques, so stay tuned!)
Concept: A Blog Carnival is basically an event where bloggers that cover a particular topic will get together and post a collection of their articles. Usually you have one hosting blog and the participants. The participants send the links to their articles and posts, and the hosting blog will then publish all the links in a single post.
There are all sorts of carnivals around the web: weekly, monthly, with fixed host, with variable host, standalone editions and so on.
Does it work?: Yes. If you manage to participate in a Blog Carnival, at the very minimum you will gain a couple of backlinks and some incoming visitors. Obviously the overall result will depend on the quality and size of the carnival in question.
When I was promoting my first blog a couple of years ago I used to participate in many blog carnivals, and some of them would bring as much as 500 visitors and dozens of backlinks.
Here is a quote from Steve Pavlina who also used them:
In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month
Over the time this practice lost some popularity, but you can still find valuable blog carnivals around the Internet, or even try to create your own.
How to get started: The easiest way to get started is to visit http://blogcarnival.com/bc/ and to browse around for carnivals that are aligned with your niche. Check the ones that have a “Next edition” coming out soon, and submit your best articles.
There are also many self-hosted carnivals around the web, where a blog owner will just publish a post asking for its readers to contribute with articles around a given topic, so keep an eye open for those as well.
Finally, depending on the size of your readership, you could also try to start your own carnival. You could host the first edition on your blog and then get other bloggers to host the subsequent editions.
Website Traffic Series
- Part 1: Using Web Design and CSS Galleries
- Part 2: Submitting Your Content to Blog Carnivals
- Part 3: Leaving Comments on Other Blogs
- Part 4: Faking A Website Sale
- Part 5: Pulling an April Fools Prank
- Part 6: Using Forum Signatures
- Part 7: Putting A Blog on Your Static Website
- Part 8: Adding a Forum to Your Site or Blog
- Part 9: Buying Targeted Traffic
- Part 10: Using Email Signatures
- Part 11: Putting Your URL On Online Profiles
- Part 12: Emailing Bloggers to Showcase Your Best Content
- Part 13: Faking a Hacker Attack
- Part 14: Promoting Your Content on Social Bookmarking Sites
- Part 15: Promoting Posts That Link to You on Social Bookmarking Sites
- Part 16: Promoting Your Content on Social Networking Sites
- Part 17: Using Article Directories
- Part 18: Exchanging Links with Partner Sites
About Mark Felix
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
For some reason I have never heard of Blog carnivals before… but from what I am seeing here, I sure am going to try it out.
Never heard of a Blog Carnival before. Wheres the reading material.
if you are going to submit your site to blog carnivals… if they get accepted then make sure u go and bookmark those sites on digg, stumbleupon etc so that people visit the sites!
Thanks for the tips dude!!
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I’m going to give a few relevant Blog Carnivals a shot. To me, it seems like just one small way to leverage your traffic. There’s probably little downside here.
I enter as many carnivals that I can find that are related to my subject matter, feminism, racism, politics etc. I may even write a post with the express desire to aim it at a carnival. I have found that I don’t get alot of hits from them however the people that are coming are interested in my subject matter and some have become regular commentators on my blog. I can see that slowly overtime this will lead to a good readership base.
@Chad, its showing that to me as well. Weird, it is the first time I came across that error.
I just went to the Blog Carnival site and got this message..
I came across that quote from Steve before I started The Office Diet, and it did encourage me to submit to blog carnivals. I’ve not seen much traffic from these (I get maybe 2-3 hits a day from the various carnivals I’ve submitted to) but it has helped HUGELY in building up the number of links to The Office Diet out there on the web.
Thanks alot. I’m going to participate in these carnivals.
Just to make it clear, I have no relation whatsoever with that blog carnival website. I don’t accept sponsored reviews, and I almost don’t even use affiliate links on this site (when I do I explicit them).
well that is sad, i thought you were a salesman,oh well,
Paul, I have no idea what you talking about :).
Exactly. It’s not a genuine endorsement of the product, carefully worded to avoid any responsibility, I am trying to help you out here guys, I’ve been a quiet subscriber to your feed for a long time, checking in when things looked interesting, and I admit to learning a great deal from it, not always what you were trying to teach, and I’m telling you that that openness in the endorsement, not an acutal commitment to how many numbers just a vague shove in the direction of the link, and your obvious reluctance to address the issue of your motivation, ie, is there a commercial link, a propreitary double interest behind it, and that i saw the site had been sold for big buckeroonies, which is to say even the appearance of dodginess, not actual dodginess, who can ever know for sure? but all you got is a reputation for credibility and even though you don’t care about one subscriber, check you numbers i been here a long time, well you just lost one,
just this evening on my way home from work, i was thinking about doing a blog carnival. glad you reminded me!
Never heard of a Blog Carnival before. Where’s the reading material.
Sounds it’s a good way to drive traffic, i will try it by myself.
And who said that?
I find that BlogCarnival is a great way to bring traffic to my blogs!
To anyone who claims they got anywhere near 50,000 hits from a blog carnival.
Paul, you referring to me or to Steve Pavlina :)?
“In my early traffic-building days, Id do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month” Bullshit. The only people go to the carnival site is to post their links, next to noone uses them for reading pruposes. I suspect the only reason you are telling people this is because you own the carnival site as well.
I can attest, blog carnivals really work. One caveat is to be really careful of who you’re “associating” with in those carnivals (made this mistake a year ago)…
Great post, I’ve been investigating blog carnivals recently and even wrote a post defining them on my blog.
Here’s the truth of blog carnivals: You’ll get the same submitters over and over – many of whom who are poor writers – who will never link back to you because someone told them reciprocal linking was bad.
I’d heard about blog carnivals before, but hadn’t gotten around to finding any yet. Thanks for the link!
Interesting topic! I am going to check out the blog carnivals now.
Mike, thanks for the input.
Carnival participation really does drive long-term, quality traffic growth. If you participate in carnivals that match your niche, you’ll be reaching your true audience. Plus, all those backlinks pay off, even when the immediate traffic doesn’t pour in.
Hello Steven,