Adding a business blog to your site, or running one separately in order to feed your site is a great way to attract attention of users and search engines alike. The various benefits of keeping a blog have been touted all over the SEO community, but rarely do commentators actually focus on the most important thing. This is, of course, making your blog popular.

It’s all well and good to say businesses should add a blog to their sites, but unless the blog generates a following not all of the benefits can be enjoyed. Certainly, your blog will provide you with fresh content, which is a great source of further search engine optimisation opportunities and will draw a few users. To really get your SEO Blog buzzing, you need something a little more.

Hosting a blog carnival is one way to draw attention to yourself in the blogging community, and a near-guaranteed path to popularity. This is because a blog carnival gives something back to the community, cross-promoting a number of blogs in a way in which everyone wins.

As with everything to do with social media, hosting a blog carnival has to be approached carefully, with an honest respect for participants. Here are just a few tips for when your business is considering hosting a carnival:

1. Study other carnivals. By reading through a few other carnivals running on the net, you can get an idea of what is involved and what the etiquette is. It will also give you an idea of who the regular participants are, and who to approach about hosting your own carnival. Leaving a few comments on blogs as you go will give you a further opportunity to develop your presence in the blogosphere, with your site referenced in your signature to further your SEO efforts when possible.

2. Approach bloggers about hosting. One of the essential elements of a successful blog carnival is co-operation. You may find someone who is willing for you to host an edition of an already existing carnival, which saves you most of the hard work.

3. Encourage participants to market. The participants in a blog carnival have a vested interest in marketing the carnival, as their blogs will benefit. This means that in hosting a carnival, you are effectively recruiting a host of marketers for the duration of the event. Make sure that participants further your site’s SEO by providing a well-written marketing blurb they can just cut and paste.

4. Keep up the quality. The written content of your site needs to be well-written, and the content you control on the blog carnival needs to be just as high in quality. Ensure that your comments and announcements are well-written and in keeping with the style of your blog. It can help to have professional advice when writing content and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about content for your site.

5. Repay the compliment. As with all social media, one-way attention will not get you very far. If you are thinking about hosting a blog carnival, it is a good idea to enter some blog entries into other carnivals. This reciprocation further establishes your blog’s position within your blogging community, and generates some handy backlinks for your site as well.

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