Using Blog Carnivals To Get More Readers To Your Blog

Posted by Charles on June 16th, 2009

This post was submitted by Debbie Dragon, writing on behalf of Trace Media, a New York SEO Company.

If the world of blogging worked like the movie “Field of Dreams”, there would be no need to worry about SEO methods to bring traffic to your blog. If you built a blog, the visitors would just show up in droves! Unfortunately, there is much more to getting blog readers than just creating and writing a blog. There are a number of techniques you can use to get more blog readers – even if you are a complete beginner.

Blog Carnivals Help Increase Blog Readers

Blog Carnivals offer bloggers a do-it-yourself method for obtaining incoming links to your site from websites offering related topics; and as a potential way for gaining new readers. It is a long term strategy, which ideally should be used on a weekly basis in order to get the best results.

A blog carnival is a little like an index that references articles contained in a number of different magazines. Basically, a carnival publishes links to articles found on numerous other blogs. They are typically articles centered around a related theme, and blog owners take turns being the “host” of the carnival and publishing the links to the articles blog owners submit for inclusion into the “carnival”.

The concept is really quite interesting, and it is one of the easiest ways for a new blogger to start generating incoming links and interest from their target market of readers. There is a website that serves as the directory for carnivals, and allows you to search for carnivals you can submit your blog posts to: BlogCarnival.com.

One of the criteria search engines use when determining which website to display first for each keyword or search term is the number of incoming links a website has. If your blog has many incoming links, you’ll be listed in a more visible position than a blog that is also related to those particular keywords but that does not have incoming links.

The “strength” of those incoming links plays an important role in your search engine positioning, as well. You don’t want just any-old site linking to your blog; it’s much more effective to have reputable websites and blogs on related topics linking to you – which is what makes blog carnivals such an effective search engine optimization strategy. Bloggers only submit their articles to carnivals that have a related theme, like personal finance for finance bloggers or parenting for mommy bloggers, and so when their articles are published in the carnivals their links are seen as “strong” in the eyes of the search engines.

Advanced Strategies for Getting More Blog Readers

If you are a new blogger, blog carnivals is a great way to increase your blog’s exposure. It takes a minimal amount of time, and offers long term results. If you are interested in using more advanced strategies to further promote your blog in the search engines and increase the number of blog readers you have, you will want to consider other methods of search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, and/or social media marketing. These techniques are slightly more advanced than blog carnivals and unless you have a lot of time to devote to learning how to implement them, you may gain better results by using specialists.

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3 Responses to “Using Blog Carnivals To Get More Readers To Your Blog”

Edward Izzys Says:
June 16th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Interesting!

I feel like there is a scarcity of good marketing today. Good marketing means which can convert the leads into sales. The only marketing that has moved me in the last couple of years is Social Media Optimization.
Dan Harrison Says:
June 17th, 2009 at 3:39 am
I’ve always wanted to do a blog carnival, but never known where to start. Have you any tips or recommendations based on carnivals you’ve done?

Dan
Debbie Dragon Says:
June 17th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Dan,
The carnivals you use would depend on the topic of your blog. If you have a personal finance blog, for example, you’ll want to find blog carnivals that focus on finance, money, debt, investing, insurance, and related topics. That way, you’ll get links to your site from related-topic blogs. The people who are reading the blog carnival will also be more likely to have interest in your blog, since it is on similar subjects.