Carnival Buzz

Ever wondered what happens to traffic on your blog when you host a blog carnival?

Hmmm.... can you guess which day I hosted the Bestest Blog Animal Carnival?

Total hits for Saturday the 13th: 546, a new record here at It's A Blog Eat Blog World

If you're interested in carnivals, a good way to get started is by hosting an edition of an existing carnival. You'll learn how carnivals work, meet new and interesting bloggers, and get more traffic coming to your blog.

It's easy!

First, find a carnival on the Blog Carnival list of carnivals. Click on the name of a carnival you want to host.

If you clicked on, say, yarnival because you love knitting, you'd go to the yarnival carnival page hosted by Blog Carnival.

Finally, click on the name next to the words "Maintained by:". You can send a message to the carnival organizer letting them know you want to host an upcoming edition.

Of course, you can always start a carnival right away. But you might want to see if someone else has a similar carnival concept to yours and join forces. Here at Blog Carnival, we've noticed that the carnivals that enlist more hosts tend to last longer and attract a larger audience.

Have fun!

Related Products: Visit our store

Read more from this blogger: It's A Blog Eat Blog World: Carnival Stats

Last week we went a little crazy and added about 40 stores to Blog Carnival. As you may know, we maintain a number of blogs on topics like phones, food, and gifts.

The Marketing Department decided each blog should have its own store, with a set of products that would be useful for each blog's audience. The Engineering Department approved the idea and, well, we took a (virtual) trip to Amazon to figure out how to build stores.

Build stores we did! Some of our favorite stores are The Travel Store, The Recipe Store, and The Cartoon Store. You can find links to our shiny new stores at the top of the left column of each of Blog Carnival's blogs.

Why are we telling you this story?

We think carnival organizers might want to consider providing stores for their audiences. Stores based on carnival topics are convenient for your audience, and can generate some cash for your carnival.

For more information, we recommend a (virtual) trip to Amazon.

Last year's predictions were about half right. We're a glass is half-full organization.

This year we're refraining from any predictions that could lead to a less than half-full glass.

But here are some of the things in our 2007 plan at Blog Carnival:

• Submission spam. Blog Carnival's submission process prevents most serious spam. We have a few zealous submitters, though, who submit their favorite Christmas cookie recipe to every food carnival, and then to the car carnival, and then to the economics carnival, and then .... We plan to provide some tools for carnival hosts to rate submissions on relevancy for feedback to the carnival community. That should help improve the relevancy of submissions to the carnivals.
• Instacarnivals. The Instacarnival has worked beyond our wildest imagination. Carnival of the Vanities, the grandpa of carnivals, almost went off the air. You'll note the Instacarnival format of the most recent edition. We think we've played a part in keeping great carnivals going, but we want to help improve the quality of each edition. We're working on ways to make it easier for carnival hosts to provide a little more background on posts included in their carnivals, and to make the Instacarnival format a little more flexible.
• Growth. The good news is the growth in the number of blog carnivals. The bad news is it's harder now to find a carnival. Carnivals were supposed to make it easier to find good blog posts. Once you find the right carnival, you can find a lot of good posts. We're working on some different ways to find carnivals. The newsstand is a good working metaphor.
• Widgets. We introduced the Blog Carnival Edition Widget last year. It has got good distribution, but we'd like to encourage more blog carnivals to use it to promote themselves. We're also working on some alternate layouts and applications for widgets.
• Sponsorships. Speaking of widgets, you'll notice that the Blog Carnival Edition Widget has an advertisement at the bottom. We're testing that as a way to generate revenue to defray our costs. It's also an opportunity for blog carnival sponsorships. This is how we think it will work. We'd like to work with blog carnivals to find corporate sponsors for their carnivals. Corporate sponsors can buy the ad space on the widget. Blog Carnival will split the advertising with the sponsored blog carnival. By distributing your carnival widget, you can get the word out about your carnival and get validation from a sponsor. Sponsors will get a very targeted, very dedicated audience that blogs about a topic relevant to the sponsor.

Carnival growth was fantastic in 2006. We're proud to be part of that growth, and the part of the carnival community.

As always, let us know if there are parts of our blog carnival service you'd like improved, or if there are services you need that we're not providing.

Best wishes to all of you and to all the carnivals. May 2007 bring many more great carnivals to the world.