When you run a blog, getting people to your site can sometimes be a challenge. Bloggers are quite a community and building respect in the community can be challenging. You have to keep working at it, you have to be friendly with many people, you have to be social. One way of being social is participating in Blog Carnivals. This will drive traffic to your site, it will help build respect for your product and it will allow you to be more social, which is so important to building more permanent traffic.
A blog carnival is a blog entry that lists other blog articles that pertain to a particular theme. Each carnival has its own theme and can either be hosted on one site every time, or can bounce between sites. For a large list of carnivals and more information on them, visit BlogCarnival.com. Blog Carnival is the biggest list of carnivals and allows you to manage a carnival and submit entries to the carnivals.
Each time you get on a carnival, you get a link to your site. If that site gets a lot of traffic to their carnival, then you will get a lot of hits as people read the carnival. If the carnival does not get a lot of traffic, you will get a few hits. Short term traffic boosts are great, but should not be the only thing you are after with a carnival.
As you work with a carnival, you should be thinking about long term gains. Yes, this will also give you an extra link, which is a gain, but you can gain so much more from a carnival, if you let it happen. You should also read the carnivals, comment on the other sites, stumble the articles you like, digg some, put some on your social bookmarking sites, etc. This will help build respect for you in the community. If your comments are useful, stumble reviews are well written, and you actually spend some time on the sites, then this builds even more respect. This social activity is key to building up a great blog. Without other people reading your sites, why spend the time building them?
As you build respect and socialize with others, while you read their sites and comment on them and stumble them, many of us will do the same for you. Being active on a couple of carnivals is a great way to do this. You might sometimes just submit your article and then never look again, but you should not do this every time. There is so much to do with a blog that you can't be active on every carnival. Pick a couple and remain loyal to them. If they have rotating hosting, volunteer to host some times. Read the articles, comment, stumble, digg, write about them on your site. Do what you would want done for you to promote your site. Promoting other sites is good business. Carnivals are a good way to promote your own as well as other sites. Use them properly and they will give you more in return.
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