3 Simple Steps For Running a Good Blog Carnival

It’s carnival time again today, with the #1 Carnival of Making Money Online.

Before I get into this week’s carnival, though, I will give you a little idea of what is involved in running a carnival on your blog.

1. Setting Up Your Carnival

Setting up is pretty easy – just go to blogcarnival.com and set up your carnival there. You will then get emails with links to the submitted articles.

2. Sorting Through The Articles

This is where it gets to be hard work.

You will get quite a few submissions that are spam, are unrelated to the topic, make no sense, or are clearly inferior in their writing. You might also get copies of someone else’s articles, so be careful, and when in doubt, check it with www.copyscape.com.

You will also get some very good articles.

What I do is to set up folders in Outlook called “Excellent“, “Good“, “Medium“, “Poor“, and “Unusable“.

After I read each article, I put its email in the appropriate folder. Spam, unrelated, etc. goes into the “Unusable” folder. The other articles go into their folders according to quality.

I try to do this as they come in, or at least a few days early, because it is too hard to read through 40-50 articles in one day.

Note: Some carnivals skip this step, and publish anything. I don’t agree with this. You have a duty to your visitors to filter out the junk and give them something useful.

3. The Carnival Post

For the carnival post itself, I take the articles in the “Excellent” and “Good” folders only, and write a sentence or two about each, linking to the article.

So, that’s about it – not too hard, but kind of time-consuming.

Today’s Carnival Entries

I had 43 submissions this week, and picked the 14 best for you to read. If you submitted after Friday, your submissions will be considered for the next carnival, 3 weeks from today.

Top Pick:

This week, I had one article that really stood out, due to its comprehensiveness and interest to my “make money online” readers. Caroline Middlebrook has written a wonderful article that details 8 Content Models, 8 Monetization Models, and 8 Traffic Models, and shows how you can mix and match among them to create a successful online business model. I highly recommend her article, 512 Ways To Make Money Online.

More Great Articles:

Marco Richter gives us an excellent article with all the details about using the Google AdWords Keywords Tool to do your keyword research. Read What Google Does Not Tell You About AdSense. Great article!

Ryan Ambrose tells us how to get Content and Copy for Your Email Marketing. Very helpful if you want to produce a newsletter and/or sell things to your email list.

Jason Koeppe reports on How To Optimize My Site – 10 Best On-Page Search Engine Optimization Tricks – some good things to think about, to get more search engine traffic to your site.

Bob Wicon tells us how he analyzed his strengths and decided to start his Wiconomics blog, in And an idea was born…

Have you thought about making money from dropped domains? Vanalli explains Everything you need to know about buying dropped domains.

From Tomaz Mencinger, we find out Link Exchange Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make, so don’t you make these mistakes!

Taylor takes part in a series about getting traffic with her post, Be Community Involved to Get More Traffic. You can find links to the other 4 posts in the series here too.

Mike discusses taking the plunge to be an entrepreneur in his post, Motivations For Taking THE PLUNGE!

Patti Blevins gives us 4 Crucial Things You Need To Do To Build your List.

Flora Earl weighs the pros and cons of paid links and paid posts in Paid Blog Postings Share Internet Wealth Around.

Ant from The Beef Jerky Blog has come up with
10 Questions to Ask When Writing Hypnotic Posts. This one is worth looking at just for the cool hypnotic graphic at the top of the post!

The Career Counselor asks (and answers), Can I Make Money as a Blogger?

Last (but not least), Salman Siddiqui tells us how to Earn “6 Times” More With Your AdSense Very Easily.

Thanks to everyone who submitted. I hope everyone enjoys these great articles. You can submit to the next carnival here.

- Pat Doyle