Many businesses begin a blog on their website as a way of promoting the site, but blogs themselves need promotion. If you’re interested in the community benefits of a blog, it’s necessary to engage on a community level rather than just hoping your users will stumble across your blog entries.

A blog carnival is a great way to promote your site and extend your influence in the blogging community. Blog carnivals are a regular event in the blogosphere, and as they offer such a great avenue for a blog’s promotion they are usually very popular. A blog participating in the carnival can attract attention from all the competing blogs and also draw a more permanent audience from the carnival’s readers.

The concept is fairly straightforward. The organiser will announce a theme, then collect blog entries from participant blogs, judge them and announce the winners. Judges are generally taken from several authoritative blogs in the community.

There are a couple of options if you’re interested in using blog carnivals to promote your blog. You can either join in on an existing blog carnival or start one. Participating in a blog carnival is very simple. There are many carnivals running at any time on many topics, and you may find that you don’t even need to write a new post.

Hosting a blog carnival requires more work, but it also results in more visits to your site. The task requires time, enthusiasm and resources. Hosting the carnival may mean that your business energies are partially directed to promoting other people’s blogs as they feature on your site. However, the host site experiences traffic from across the blogosphere and gains notoriety. There is also the possibility of guest hosting the carnival for one edition, bringing the same benefits for a little less work.

Either approach can lead to a lot of links to your blog, boosting your site’s SEO, and increased interest in your site from the blogging community. By entering a blog carnival, you distribute your content over the net and attain at least one backlink.

One other advantage to hosting or participating in a blog carnival is the news factor. Using social media to promote the event furthers your site’s search engine optimisation, particularly if your site is hosting the carnival. Social media networks can be a great way to promote your blog in general, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about using social media to further your search engine optimisation. Carnival participants are usually willing to promote the carnival on social media sites, meaning that you inadvertently acquire 50 or so free marketers working for your site when you run a carnival.

When engaging in this kind of competition, it is important to keep the quality of all posts and replies up to a certain standard. A sloppily run carnival can get you a bad reputation in blogging circles, turning that entire potential good buzz inside out. Any entry on your blog needs to be well-written, but continuity in quality during a blog carnival can be harder to keep track of. In the end, the effort can result in continued popularity of your blog.

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