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Running A Blog Carnival Successfully - See CoSBI

Posted by John W. Furst on
CoSBI
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Just a short note to let you know that the lates edition of the Carnival of Small Business Issues - The Canarian - Edition #30 (CoSBI) got featured on the homepage of BlogCarnival.com (↑).

All participants, hosts, and the organizer Charan “CA”Atreya are honored by this. It demonstrates the high quality of this particular carnival. Furthermore, the Carnival is now being featured the 2nd time, when hosted on my E-Biz Booster Blog. I am especially happy about this, because I focus on quality instead of quantity.

What can you learn here?

When organizing a carnival or hosting an edition you have to make a choice
  • You spend some extra time for picking the best articles or
  • You simply publish the InstaCarnival Page as provided by Blogcarnival.com (↑) or
  • anything in between.

You find carnivals that publish only 5 Top articles, which is the other extreme to those featuring more the 60 articles at the time.

The quality of a carnival edition is based on the submitted articles and quality of the originating blogs. Since both facts vary from edition to edition it is best to make a choice based on what you have to work with, when it's time again to “Carnival”.


Ideas For Improvement

Just two things that come to my mind right now.
  • When submitting: Fill out all forms, including the remarks field when submitting. If not it looks like you don't really care. Don't just copy & paste either. Write a unique teaser.
  • Submit old entries only, if they are of timeless value and updated, if necessary.
  • When hosting don't limit submissions to 1 article per edition. That's hard to track for the submitter and totally unnecessary. You have more choices and if your policy is to feature an author only 1 time, then do so, but don't require the submitters to keep track of it.
  • All participants should engage in a fair level of leaving comments, and social bookmarking.


There are some folks that get featured all the time, even though they don't show any reciprocity at all.
  • They don't fill out the remarks.
  • They rarely accept trackbacks or have comments closed.
  • They don't do social bookmarking.
  • They never host a carnival.
  • etc.

  • All they do is submitting. Some of them have great content, which your readers can benefit from, but that's all.

What do you think?
“Would you feature those folks or not?”

If you have additional ideas or an answer to this question, please, leave a comment and let us know.

I'll give my personal answer to this question in a couple of days. Most likely as a comment. In order to not miss it, leave a comment and subscribe to it via email.

Or should I implement a silo structure (↑), like Andy Beard suggests (for high traffic posts only of course, because it is a lot of work).

Yours
John W. Furst

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Dawn Rivers Baker on :

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I don't think I would be inclined to hold out on my readers because of self-involved contributors. On the other hand, I think I would probably succumb to human nature and put them at the bottom of the "maybe" list next time I host that Carnival.

I think it is safe to say that the success of any blog carnival is dependent in part on the administrative conscientiousness of its organizer and, possibly in greater part, by on the contributions of the niche community served by that carnival.

It has been my online experience that the folks who are the most self-serving tend to get bitten in the butt by their egocentricity, while those who act with genuine community end up helping themselves as well as their fellows.

Funny how that works.

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