Steve Pavlina recommends blog carnivals as a way of increasing reader traffic. The wikipedia definition of blog carnival is:
A Blog Carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks links to other blog articles on the particular topic.
There are many variations, but typically, someone who wants to organize a carnival posts details of the theme or topic to their blog, and asks readers to submit relevant articles for inclusion in an upcoming edition. The host then collects links to these submissions, edits and annotates them (often in very creative ways), and publishes the resulting round-up to his or her blog.
Many carnivals have a home page or principal organizer, who lines up guest bloggers to host each edition. This means that the carnival travels, appearing on a different blog each time.
Communities of blog readers, writers, and edition hosts form around specific carnivals. The carnivals provide a nice aggregation of recent posts by the community on a given topic, and the host provides a level of editing and annotation that helps readers find posts they are interested in. Writers who submit their articles to blog carnivals are rewarded with traffic (if the host decides to give them a link and, perhaps, a positive review).
I’ve entered my first article for a medical blog carnival via blogcarnival.com. I’ll report back here on how it goes.
Aside: If I have the concept right coRank acts as a sort of blog carnival - I submit my stories there (and those of others) and other coRankers vote on the relevance of my submissions. I get some traffic through from coRank so it is working for me - it might be worth looking at for you too.
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