A blog carnival, it sounds like a family outing more than something you do online doesn’t it?  Many people wonder about what exactly a blog carnival is, and if it can actually help increase awareness of your blog or not.  Here’s the details on a blog carnival.

A blog carnival is when you as a blog owner host a sort of “online party”.  You determine a topic or theme, post about it and have others post a blog post around  that same “topic” or theme and link back to your blog.  It creates buzz, drives traffic and give you and those who participate “link love”. 

Can it help increase awareness of your site? Sure.

Can it be a lot of hard work? Absolutely.

Is it worth it for you and your business? You decide.

If you decide to host a blog carnival there are a few things to remember.

You must establish some rules and guidelines. Just like with any thing else there are going to be those who want to use this to their advantage and take advantage of you so you must have some rules in place and insist that everyone play by the rules.

Locate a link builder to use for the carnival. There are several that you can use including:

Mr. Linky this tool has been around a long time and has been used for multiple blog carnivals across the web, but it does have some blips.

Linky Tools is a new kid on the block but was created as a result of those who were frustrated with the former.

Promote, promote, promote. If you are going to go to ALL this trouble to host a blog carnival you must promote it, share it, shout it from the rooftops.  You create the buzz.  You want to do everything you can to bring in the participants.

Check the links. Many times spammers take advantage of these type carnivals so you want to be sure to check the links for this but for also just typos and mistakes made by individuals.  You also want to make sure that participants link to the blog carnival post itself and not the front page of their site or blog.  Readers do not want to have to search for the post of the participant.

This should give you a good idea as to what a blog carnival is, what’s involved in hosting one and the benefits of them.  Now it is up to you to decide whether or not you want to host one, or just go out on the web and find one that you can participate in and gain that “link love” from,  it is YOUR choice.

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Let’s face it, Facebook has a lot of applications that are inevitably a waste of time.  However, there is at least this one that I highly recommend.  Networked Blogs allows users to pull in their blog posts to their Facebook page and fan pages allowing you to automatically share your blog posts without having to do all the extra work of coming to those pages and copying and pasting the links.  It is all automated once you set it up and then allows others to share your blog as well, creating for you a “network” of readers. 

It even creates a thumbnail of your blog so that Facebook readers can not only read your posts but “see” them as well.  It also allows others to find you if they are searching for the topics that you blog about, promoting you even more.  It truly is worth the few minutes it takes to set up in Facebook.

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