I enjoy reading the personal finance carnivals and this week was no exception. Believe it or not, it takes a lot of time and effort to read all the entries submitted, organize, and promote them. I wanted to take a moment and mention some of them.
Personal Finance Carnivals
- Carnival of Personal Finance was hosted by Simply Forties.
- Four Pillars ran the Carnival of Money Hacks.
- Carnival of Pecuniary Delights was hosted by Pecuniarities.
- The Good Life on a Budget organized the Festival of Frugality.
- Carnival of Financial Planning was hosted by Intelligent Speculator.
Supporting Carnivals
The wonderful thing about blog carnivals is that it is a two way street. If you participate in a blog carnival, you should link back to it to help the host gain traffic. You can also promote the carnival by:
- Tweeting it when it publishes
- Stumble it
- Submit it to a social media site for the topic, such as Tip’d or PFBuzz for personal finance.
Promoting Your Blog with Blog Carnivals
If you need help to promote your blog, try using BlogCarnival. The site has a ton of carnivals listed and it’s easy to submit several entries. Free Money Finance has a great resource on how blog carnivals can bring you traffic. Some of my favorite tips were:
Get your post as high up (or “as early in” if you prefer) in the carnival as possible. This is simply the law of “a good post seen first is more likely to get clicked than one later down the line”. Obviously, if your post is up top, you get exposed to people first and more often (some people quit reading after a few posts) and as such you get better traffic. My results show that having a link up top gets about twice the traffic that a lower link gets (note: I haven’t noticed that much of a difference between a link half way down the page and at the bottom, but it’s likely that there is some difference, though it’s smaller.)
Use a catchy title for your submission. All other things being equal, a title that catches the eye of readers will generate twice the traffic to your site as a generic boring title. Which would you click on first “How to Become a Millionaire” or “Money News”?
Blog Carnivals and Promotions
How have you used blog carnivals to promote your site? Have you noticed a difference in traffic?
