Entrepreneur’s Journey At The Carnival

For the bloggers out there you may have stumbled across what is called a Blog Carnival. A blog carnival is a network tool that aims to create awareness of all the great content created by bloggers. Each week the carnival moves to another blog and it is that blog owner’s job to write the carnival post, which links to all the best content created by other bloggers that week. Bloggers may submit their original content to the carnival to help increase the exposure of their blog. Each carnival is focused on a particular niche and with the carnival concept well developed there is generally a carnival for every topic you might be blogging about.

This is a great networking tool for bloggers. The host of the carnival each week enjoys a nice jump in traffic and backlinks in exchange for their work reviewing and recommending the best articles in the blogosphere for their industry in that week. The article writers (bloggers) gain some additional exposure as the carnival is showcased all around the blogosphere.

As with any concept like this there is a critical mass point before a carnival really takes off. You need to have enough bloggers linking to the carnival host each week, enough bloggers submitting articles and enough blogs signing up to host the carnival in the future (throw a credibility standard and quality benchmark in there too for good measure). The more blogs that support the carnival the greater the traffic to the blogs in the carnival and the more desirable it is to become part of the carnival.

I came across this handy carnival submission form that prompted me to finally submit to some carnivals. I’ve heard good things about two business related carnivals that I thought my content would be appropriate for so I submitted my article, How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit, to the Carnival of the Capitalists and the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Along with my article you can find links to other great blogs in this week’s edition of the Carnival of the Capitalists at DrakeView and the Carnival of Personal Finance at Canadian Capitalist.

Marketing Results

For the marketers in attendance I can report back that my participation in the blog carnival did not provide any significance difference in terms of a raw traffic increase beyond what a standard blog backlink would provide. I consider participation in a blog carnival similar to other long term online marketing techniques - rinse and repeat and you will build a reputation and traffic through compound effects.

*Update*

The Carnival of Personal Finance performed better for raw incoming traffic numbers than the Carnival of the Capitalists. I can also report that a few additional backlinks from other bloggers were generated as a result of choosing my article as one of their favourites from the carnival. I should ‘upgrade’ my comments above to state that I think a listing in a blog carnival is like a backlink from a popular blog. The traffic is significant enough to register on the metre and, just like a good blog backlink, may spiral off into more backlinks. So ahh, yeah, it’s a good thing to do folks - get out there and write a good article and take it to the carnival.