How To Get Links Using Blog Carnivals
October 5th, 2007 by CourtMost of the ‘make money online‘ and internet marketing blogs out there write about blog carnivals. What’s funny to me is the language they use when they write about this topic. They are usually exaggerating the effectiveness like this:
- Do you want to drive loads of targeted traffic to your site?!
- Would you like to see your posts featured on high traffic sites?
- Would you like to turbo-charge your site’s traffic?
The blog carnival gives make money online blogs something to write about, and each if them wants to act like they have all the secrets to ‘massive amounts of traffic’. I’ve been featured in a lot of different blog carnivals, and I can tell you right now that they aren’t going to refer much traffic to you. There are a few different reasons for this:
- Many of the sites that host blog carnivals don’t get that much traffic.
- Usually 10-25 posts are featured in each carnival. This dilutes the individual posts somewhat.
- Bloggers don’t really publicize their carnivals as well as they could.
What Blog Carnivals Really Are
Blog carnivals are lists of posts that are published on a blog. If I hosted a carnival I would create a post and link to all of the posts that were submitted to the carnival. Carnivals are a really good way to get one-way links to your site that have the anchor text of your choice. This can lead to some residual search traffic and increased rankings. Usually when you get published in a carnival, they will link to both your homepage and your post, giving you an opportunity to get an anchor text link to your homepage.
When you submit to each blog carnival, you get to put your blog’s name and URL. If I wanted to get a link using ‘internet marketing’, you would use ‘internet marketing’ for the name, and http://yourdomain.com for the URL. Then when the carnival was created, it would look like this (the link would be to your site instead of mine):
Internet Marketing presents, “John Chow Gets Google Slapped Again“
See how that works out? 
How To Use BlogCarnival.com
The site I use to carnival is BlogCarnival.com. The process was a little hard to figure out at first, so here’s the basic procedure I follow when using their service:
1. Go to the site and log in. Obviously if you haven’t used their service before you’re going to have to sign up first. It’s pretty easy to sign up, and you won’t have to give too much information to do so.
2. Once you have logged in, you will click the link on the left that says ‘Browse all carnivals’. It looks like this:
3. Once you’ve gone to ‘Browse all carnivals’, you’re going to see some carnivals on your screen. They really aren’t arranged very well for you, which is why I now click a little button that sorts the carnivals by when they are going to be published, it’s in the upper right hand corner:
At that point, you’re going to see which carnivals are going to be coming up soon, starting with today.
4. At this point, I read down through the carnivals to find that ones that match up with articles I have already written. I don’t write articles specifically for carnivals. Usually since all of my posts are about internet marketing, I find the carnivals that have to do with that. I have also submitted articles to personal development carnivals before, because I have some posts that work with that kind of thing.
There are carnivals there for many different topics, you’ll have to look through what’s there to see if there are some carnivals that work with your content.
5. Once I find a carnival that I want to submit to, I click on its name. Tip: don’t click the date, edition, or category or you’ll end up in the wrong place. Click the name of the carnival you want to submit to.
6. You will then see a description page of that particular carnival. To actually submit, you have to find a link that is very inconveniently placed all the way at the bottom of the page. The link says ’submit an article’ - it looks like this:
7. At that point, you’re going to see a form that you need to fill out. You will fill in the URL and title of the post or article you want to submit and the URL and title of your blog. Sometimes the host of the carnival will have it split into categories, and if that’s the case you will choose the best one.
8. Click submit. That’s it, you’re done.
Many Carnivals Publish Weekly
Since many of the carnivals will publish a new issue each week, I never look through more than one week of carnivals. You can easily see the date each one will be published so that isn’t too difficult. Submitting your best article or two each week to as many carnivals as possible will be the most productive way to go because of the timing of carnivals.
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October 5th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Thanks for this, Court. You answered a question that popped in my head, just yesterday.
Aside from that, I always appreciate how you deliver information without hype. Bonus points to you, for that!
Sincerely,
Meg
I Follow
October 5th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
You’re welcome Meg! If you ever want to send me a question through email feel free!
October 5th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Court thank you so much for the step by step, I had subscribed to exactly this carnival and after that said mmmmm ok now what, so I did the logical thing, went back to my dashboard to write a new post because I felt stupid, had no idea what so ever what to do.
No I totally understand it and how to do it.
Again as always Thanks
Vic
October 5th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
You’re welcome! It took me a while to figure their site out. I think they would probably have a lot more users if the site was more user friendly. Anyway, I’m glad that the lesson helped you out.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Ive read about blog carnivals before but I didnt know it would count as a backlink. I thought it uses nofollow. Ill give it a try.
Thanks
October 5th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
I’ve never seen any with nofollow, so you should be good there.
October 5th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
It took me 3 tries before I figured out how to submit articles to blogcarnivals. They need to work on the usability of their site.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
For real Fred! Someone should just make a new site and knock them out of the water.
October 5th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
It’s true that they won’t refer very much traffic. Often you get just one, or two per carnival. But the traffic you do get is very targeted, so I suppose it’s of use. You also get a backlink or two, so it has SEO effect.
I decided to host a carnival - called Carnival of Webmasters. Look it up when you next go on a submission spree
October 5th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
That sounds like a really good one! I’ll have to watch for it and submit to it. Thanks for the heads up!
October 5th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
I was submitting to carnivals regularly when I first started my site, and then somewhere along the way I became very busy with all of the (many!) other blogging tasks on my list. I have been meaning to get back in the groove with them just because it is another way to find some new readers, even though (you’re right) they don’t really bring you “boatloads” of traffic.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
It’s so easy to forget about things, I do that all the time! You’re right, there is so much that you can do and sometimes there is too much to do.
October 5th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Followed all the steps and submit my first articles to a Carnival YESSSSSSSSSSS!
Hey Court now I could make a Carvival on Ants and then submit my own articles to it?
October 5th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Nice! Yeah you could! Hahahaha
October 13th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Hey Vic, I have a quick question for you. I was wanting to find out what methods you have been using to get your internal links to 55,000+. Any pointers in this area would be much appreciated.
thanks
October 5th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Thanks for explaining it in detail, though I knew about it was was confused with the procedure. Now, everything will be alright.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
You are most welcome.
Very cool domain name BTW.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
I joined BlogCarnival months ago but have yet to participate. After reading this I feel comfortable and ready to give it a try. Thanks for always providing such great info. You are appreciated
October 8th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Well I appreciate your appreciation.
October 6th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Umm… Courtney… you lost me when I read, “What’s funny to me is the language they use when they right about this topic.”
It’s somewhat ironic when a writer writes that other people right.
October 6th, 2007 at 10:19 am
Thanks for the correction, it’s all better now.
Who ever said I was a writer?
October 6th, 2007 at 10:38 am
Thanks, for the nice info,
In fact, I had become a member of this site about three months back, but just like Vic, I also could not understand exactly how to use it without giving much of the inputs.
It didn’t struck me to use my ol d posts here.
Thanks, in fact I submitted two posts today.Let’s see the results.
October 8th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Cool silky! I wish you luck. Hopefully you can get into both of them.
October 6th, 2007 at 10:42 am
How do you host a carnival?
October 6th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Hey Court,
This is off topic, but what plugin do you use to respond to comments like that?
Thanks!
Liz
October 7th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Hi Liz! That would be Brian’s Threaded Comments!
October 7th, 2007 at 6:09 am
[…] Tuttle wrote How to Get Links Using Blog Carnivals. I really think that blog carnivals are good for beginning […]
October 7th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Good explanation there Courtney, I wish you had posted that before I struggled with their website! I really wish they would take off defunct carnivals. Every single carnival from a search of their site was listed as ‘This carnival listing has been discontinued’ Hmm…. wonder how hard it would be to set a rival site?
October 8th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
I should have posted earlier on this!
They really could do a much better job with their site. I don’t think it would be that hard to make a rival site.
October 7th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Yeah the discontinued was very frustrating when I was browsing the site for the first time.
October 8th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
You should give it another shot Windy!
October 7th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
I really enjoyed this post since I’ve been trying to grasp how to use Blog Carnival to get more traffic.
Thanks for the tip Courtney.
Cheers,
Carlo Selorio
October 8th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
You’re welcome Carlo! Glad to be of service.
October 7th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
[…] a post online that explains what Blog Carnival is and how to use it. The post is called “How To Get Links Using Blog Carnival”. I thought you might be interested if you have heard about this service and were wondering […]
October 8th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
hey thanks i enjoy your post a lot
October 8th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Well thanks for the motivation Courtney. I submitted an article to Yarnival, due out October 15 and am hosting one as well. Yippee!
I did find some excellent links on September’s Yarnival.
October 9th, 2007 at 6:33 am
I get a little traffic from the carnivals that usually only feature a limited number of submissions. As far as the host is concerned though they probably make for a good way to get to know other like minded bloggers.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Wow, thanks for the info on blog carnivals. It was very informative and I think I will give it a try. You have a great site, I will visit often.
October 9th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
I could have done with this post a couple of weeks ago and I had just started experimenting with it. They certainly have not sent very much traffic but it’s still a few links which is nice for a new blog like mine.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
[…] navigating the Blog Carnival website, I suggest that after reading my post you take a look at this excellent walk-through by Courtney Tuttle. You’ll learn the best ways to use Blog Carnivals, […]
October 11th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Hey Court,
I’ve submitted a few of my blog post to blogcarnival.com. It was a lot easier than I thought. Now I just check if it will bring traffic to my site.
Cheers,
Carlo Selorio
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:09 pm
I have never been able to have any success using blog carnival. I try to find blogs that use DOFOLLOW links but their is next to nothing these days.
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:21 pm
I submitted stuff to cat carnival, yarnival and one other. I got decent traffic from two of them. So it generated something and possibly some return readers.
November 1st, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Great steps man
November 1st, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Great steps thanks for the great post
January 13th, 2008 at 2:21 am
How much traffic does this bring you each week?
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:43 am
how do u guys host carnival.
February 13th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Thank you for informing me about blog carnivals. If you can find carnivals for your niche keyword, it’s worth the backlink to submit an already written article, but it’s probably not worth it… thanks for being honest with your posts… also thanks for being so descriptive when describing processes…