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12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 10: Blog Carnivals
A blog carnival is like an online magazine where a collection of blog posts are published on a common theme, but from different authors. Each edition of a blog carnival is a single blog article that contains permalinks links to other blog articles on the chosen topic. Blog carnivals are an excellent way to get one-way inbound links and traffic. And like all the techniques I've discussed so far, they are free.
Other sources of web traffic such as search engines and high-traffic social networking sites like Digg are dominated by larger players (who can invest $ for adwords and other advertising) and power users who command the lion's share of attention. It will take you some time to work your way up into visibility on these sites. Blog carnivals, on the other hand, are very newbie-friendly. As long as you produce some quality content and put in some effort, you can get in the game quite quickly. At first your readers will tend to be other people involved in carnivals, but that is ok because you will establish visibility and relationships with potential peers and build a solid foundation for traffic.
Blog carnivals involve the organizer (who is like the publisher), the host (who is like the editor) and the bloggers who submit posts. The organizer starts the carnival and defines what it will be about, what the submission criteria are, and how often it will appear. They also coordinate who will host each edition of the carnival and publish details on upcoming carnivals. The host is a blogger who volunteers for an uncoming edition of the carnival. The host then collects links from all the submitters (other bloggers), organizes them into a single article, and finally publishes the collection on his or her blog. Each edition may be hosted by a different blogger so that the carnival travels around in that's carnival's community.
The place to start with blog carnivals is, naturally enough:
You should browse around to find carnivals that are a good fit for your topic area. There is also a pretty decent FAQ to walk you through the process. Here is another introductory article on blog carnivals which seems to be popular: Five Questions (And Answers) About Blog Carnivals.
How do I plan to employ this technique towards picobuzz.com? Well, as it turns out, I will soon have accumulated 12 new articles to draw material from. Sure, I wouldn't just throw all of them out there and I will have to do some editing, but it gives me a great running start. You would almost think I planned it that way.
rk
