What is a blog carnival?

A blog carnival is a collection of links submitted by bloggers. They highlight recent posts across the blogosphere that are related to the carnival’s theme (i.e. personal finance, diet and fitness, writing, etc.)

Posted on blogs themselves, carnivals are ideally published on a regular basis (weekly, bi-monthly, monthly). In the best case scenario, the hosts rotate, so each week a link to one of your posts has a chance to appear on a different blog. (Sometimes they’re published on the same site each week which limits the usefulness of the links–you may want to submit a couple times, but there’s less SEO benefit from submitting frequently).

You can usually volunteer to host an existing carnival, and of course you can start one up yourself (this may be worth doing if there isn’t anything out there in your niche).

How useful are blog carnivals for increasing links and traffic?

I regard any link to my site from another regularly updated site as a good thing, and when we’re talking about a blog in a related niche, it’s even better.

However… when your link is one of dozens listed in a blog post, you may wonder how much it’s going to count for in the broad scheme of things. Honestly it probably won’t matter much. It’s certainly not going to take your blog from a 10,000,000-something search engine ranking to a top 10 ranking.

Still, every little bit helps. As they say, don’t look a gift link horse in the mouth.

Blog carnival links are free, and it’s easy to submit your posts for consideration (just head to the aptly named Blog Carnival site to browse the list and find related carnivals).

Other reasons to participate in blog carnivals

It’s always worth thinking beyond the links. Blog carnivals can provide an opportunity to network with fellow niche bloggers.

When your post appears in a blog carnival, you can head over and see all the other bloggers writing in your niche. If you go visit these related sites, you might find some good people to strike up relationships with. Leave some comments on their sites, and maybe drop them a line. This could lead to blogroll link exchanges and–even better–guest blogging opportunities.

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

What Is a Blog Carnival?

If you’ve been promoting your websites (or eHow articles, Squidoo lenses, etc.) for a while, you may have already tried posting in forums to drive traffic. If you haven’t gotten much out of it, this article is for you. If you haven’t tried it at all, this article is also for you. If you’re just bored at work and looking for something to read, this article is for you too. (What can I say? I don’t like to discriminate.)

A busy forum already gets a lot of daily visitors. The idea is to leverage that site’s popularity and send some of those visitors your direction.

Here are the steps to make forum posting an effective mode of promotion:

1. Find the best forums in your niche

If the forum isn’t related to your niche (or doesn’t at least have the same demographic of readers), then posting there is going to be a waste of time insofar as promoting your site goes. So if you’re a writer blogging about triathlons, it behooves you to hang out in the triathlon forum instead of (or in addition to) all those writer forums.

Try Googling “niche + forum” or “niche + message board” to find popular ones in your field.

Good forums that can send you a lot of traffic will probably have thousands of members and tens of thousands of posts. Not only are you hoping those members might visit your site, but you might also get some “lurkers” and people who find the posts via search engine results.

Forums do come and go though so make sure the one you’re thinking of joining has people visiting today, not just at some distant point in the past.

2. Create a signature with a link to your site

The way you’ll get traffic from a forum is by posting a signature with a link to your site (most forum software allows you to create a blurb that automatically shows up under all your posts).

Before you get too excited about any particular forum you find, scan through the threads and make sure you see signatures with links at the bottoms of people’s posts. You want to be able to add an active link to your website. If you don’t see folks posting links in signatures, it’s likely the forum has terms of service that forbid it. You can usually find a “stickie” post or FAQ somewhere that states the rules of the forum, so you can double check there.

If your primary goal is to drive traffic to your site, it’s not worth participating in a forum that doesn’t allow signature links. Feel free to give these forums a virtual middle finger as you click the back button on your browser.

Creating an effective signature tag

As for the signature tag itself, the best way to find out what works is to change your blurb every couple weeks. See what entices the most people to click through.

For one of my early sites on home gyms, I posted in fitness forums to get visitors (hoping they’d come join my forum and chat it up).

A signature that worked well for me was along the lines of “Read [link]real people’s reviews of the Bowflex[/link] home gym, and get your questions answered in our [link]Bowflex forum[/link].” ( I was working out on a used Bowflex at the time, so I had written reviews and information on several of the company’s models for my site.)

It wasn’t brilliant copywriting but what it did well was ensure I only got visitors who were interested in what my site was about (Bowflex), and it also told folks exactly what they could find if they clicked (something useful). I got a lot of traffic that way, in part because I was posting on an already-popular site, and in part because my posts and signature attracted people who were interested in what my site was about.

While I’ve since moved on to other niches and that site has died off (and I’ve given away the Bowflex and joined a tennis club), I still find forum posting to be an excellent way to bring new visitors to a site.

But how do you make sure your signature links are noticed in the first place?

3. Become a thought leader in the community

This is where a lot of people fail when it comes to driving traffic through forum posting. They post “me too” comments, or they write intelligent posts… that are located half way down the 18th page in a thread.

If you want to be noticed, start topics instead of just contributing to others. And start topics that will catch people’s attention.

Watch the forum for a while and ferret out the trends. What are people interested in and how can you say something useful and original on that topic? (If this forum is related to the niche you already write about, this shouldn’t be that hard!)

Start threads that are helpful or controversial.

Helpful threads (i.e. How-to posts) attract a lot of eyeballs, because people are always looking for specifics on how to do things. A few months ago, I got a ton of visitors from a post I did at the Warrior Forum, which was named something like “Top Tips from a Six-Figure-a-Year Adsense Publisher.” Since it was in the Adsense section of the forum, you can guess there were a lot of readers looking for just those kinds of tips.

Controversial threads also attract a lot of eyeballs because people are eager to contribute when they have strong opinions.

The idea is to be on top of a thread that gets a lot of visitors and a lot of posts (the more people post, the longer your thread will be on the first page of the forum). This increases the chances of you (and your signature link) being noticed.

Now… go forth and post!

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

How to Drive Traffic to Your Site by Posting in Forums

It’s not because I’m weird (much) or deranged (much). No, there’s a story behind that grin.

A few years ago, a female friend and I were inline skating on a local trail and stopped to use the “facilities” afterward. After coming out, I wiped my hands dubiously on my shorts, and lamented that these darned port-a-potties always had dispensers for sanitary gel but never actually had any sanitary gel.

“Oh, I just used the soap,” my friend said.

I raised an eyebrow. “Soap?”

I was sure there hadn’t been any soap. In fact, I’ve never seen a port-a-potty with soap in it.

“Yeah,” she said. “There’s a bar in the sink.”

Sink?

…

Oh.

At that point I fell down laughing. The real kind of fall-down-laughing where you roll around and everything. It was quite a while before I could stop long enough to explain that the “sink” was the urinal and the “soap” was a urinal cake.

Now, lest you think my friend was dumb, she actually owned her a successful business back then and was a pretty smart cookie. She just hadn’t spent much time in port-a-potties.

By now you’re probably asking yourself what on earth (or in this universe) this has to do with your website.

Nothing. I just love sharing this story.

Okay, kidding. There is a point I want to make.

The people who build port-a-potties assume everyone who goes into one knows the purpose of all the parts. But here in the U.S., it’s very uncommon for a private residence to have a urinal, and most women don’t spend a lot of time in men’s public lavatories. Also the plastic port-a-potty version doesn’t look much like the ones in public buildings anyway.

Because of an assumption by the port-a-potty manufacturer, my friend was thoroughly embarrassed and disgusted. I may be able to grin at the memory, but I imagine my friend cringes every time she sees a port-a-potty.

It’s true that the portable bathroom next to the trail is there for our convenience and doesn’t exist to sell us anything, but if it were a business, it would have lost a customer.

It just so happens that I see a lot of blogs and sites, many that are trying to sell products or make money in some manner, that fail to announce what the point of the site is.

Either there is no tag line at all, or the tag line doesn’t tell the reader anything useful. You might see some vague mission statement for the company, but this doesn’t give the visitor an answer to the age old question: what’s in it for me?

In short, the people behind these websites assume visitors are going to automatically know what the site is about and whether there’s anything useful on it for them.

That’s an assumption that can lose you a customer or a reader.

I don’t have to tell you that people are impatient. If you’re like me, you’re one of those impatient people.

Visitors don’t want to scroll through a site to see if any of the posts pertain to them.

What if 95% of your posts are on fitness and are meant to sell your DVD on prenatal yoga, but on the day that a potential prenatal-yoga-seeking customer landed on the front page, you decided to discuss diet, or tips for staying motivated, or… port-a-potties.

That reader might stick around, but if she was specifically looking for yoga advice, she might not. If her first (and probably only) impression was the wrong one, she might not click around enough realize you have all sorts of yoga information in the archives (and that great DVD to boot).

Don’t assume the purpose of your site is obvious.

Chances are if visitors surf into your site and don’t “get it” right away, they’ll just click the back button. After all, there were nine other search results on that first page of Google.

Fortunately, this is an easy fix: create a tag line that explains the purpose of your site, and put it someplace noticeable.

That’s it!

And ladies, always be careful where you wash your hands…

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

Does Your Website Suffer from the Same Problem as Most Port-a-Potties?