Running A Blog Carnival Successfully - See CoSBI

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