If you want to increase traffic to your site, it's good to get a blog. Once you've got a blog, you need to let people know it exists. Blog carnivals are an excellent way to promote your blog and website and bring new visitors.

What Is A Blog Carnival?

A blog carnival is where you get to show off the stuff you've been writing about in your blog. A carnival is a collection of blog posts around a theme. In most cases you submit your own posts to the carnival or carnivals. There are carnivals for everything, it seems - dogs, cats, the kitchen sink, family life.

Listing A Blog Post

Submit it to the blog carnival of your choice, but make sure the content is appropriate. Almost all the carnivals have rules about what they will and will not accept and the age of the blog post. There are two good places to start. First, conservativecat.com has a carnival submission form which makes the process easy. The page has a list of several blog carnivals, the deadline for submission and space to put in the blog post title and author, your email address and any comments. There is also lots of other carnival related information on the page. A second option is a similar list on blogcarnival.com. This makes it even easier to see the carnival name, category and due date for the next edition.

Building Traffic With Blog Carnivals

Once you've submitted your post, whoever is hosting the carnival does a roundup of the posts. An email is then sent out to all participants to let them know the carnival has been posted. Submission to blog carnivals can get new attention for old blog posts.

Another option is to host a blog carnival. This means reading and summarizing all the blog posts submitted. That will bring even more traffic to your site.

Additional Blog Carnival Benefits

Another benefit of blog carnivals is that they can tell you who else is posting similar material and give you new blogs to visit. The more blogs you visit and comment on, the more comments and visits your own blog will attract. Seems like a good deal.