While searching for new ideas on how to attract more visitors, I came across something called a blog carnival, yet I still am no exactly sure how it works. Despite my inability to wrap my head around the concept, I found a number of articles where people raved about how successful they are at bringing in significantly more traffic.
The thing that concerns me about tactics that bring in a rush of new traffic over a short period of time is its long term effectiveness. Although, if each blog carnival came and went and I managed to attract even a few visitors that felt it was worth coming back from time to time, I suppose I’d have to call it a success.
I have read varying descriptions of how a blog carnival works. Apparently someone organizes a blog carnival on a specific topic, and somebody else hosts the articles that bloggers submit on the topic. The bloggers then place a link on their site back to the person hosting it. The traffic comes from bloggers in the carnival checking out the articles as well as from various other visitors who stumble on to the hosts site.
I’m a tad skeptical about how this will all help if the majority of this short term traffic comes from other bloggers who are trying to do the same thing. I’m not saying you can’t make fans of your blogging competition, but anyone trying to grow a website and build a following spends a lot more time creating content than reading it.
Another problem I have is the topic I enjoy talking about is fairly non-existent. I don’t see too many people talking about open source software from the non-programmer perspective. Even the posts on website building are more experimental than instructional. If I want to find a suitable category to submit to, I am going to have to bridge the gap by posting something more beneficial and proven than my usual trial and error approach.
Despite my concerns, I’ll still give it a try. What could it hurt, right? The first thing I have to do is create a worthwhile article before I go submitting it and putting the spotlight on it. I figure this is long overdue because I can use this future link bait for more than just a blog carnival. There’s also the possibilities of picking up some views from sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon too.