Discovering Blog Carnivals

Posted on December 25th, 2007 in Marketing your blog, Useful resources, Writing posts by Karen Bryan

I’ve just started experimenting with blog carnivals on my European travel blog. Participating in Blog Carnivals is recommend by Problogger as giving you links to sites in your field, increasing traffic and being easy to do. Although I’ve vaguely heard of blog carnivals, my intention was converted to action by Darren and his Travel Blog Carnival. I’m one of the founding group of bloggers who will host the travel relate posts on their own travel blog starting in January 2008.


Madeira Carnival by Madeira

I then decided to do the carnival rounds and submitted a post on UK budget travel tips to the Travel on a Shoestring Carnival which features Europe on the first Saturday of the month. I’ve also submitted a post about my birthplace of Dundee in Scotland to the Carnival of Cities.

I’ll be hosting the Carnival of Cities on 7 January with the theme of “Off the beaten track: Cities in Europe” if you like to email a post for inclusion. If you’d like to host the Carnival of Cities you can make contact here.

If you’d like to start a new Blog Carnival on a topic related to your blog, you can start the set up on the Blog Carnival site.

I’ll report back on how successful my foray in carnivals has been in terms of promoting my blog by getting more links and more readers and in making mutually beneficial contacts with other travel bloggers.

Have you taken part in Blog Carnivals? Have you found this to be time well spent?

Should you go all out for blogroll links?

Posted on December 7th, 2007 in Marketing your blog, Useful resources by Karen Bryan

I’m rather puzzled because although my travel blog has 62 links showing on Technorati and a  ranking of just over 120,000, a couple of months ago I had 60 links with a ranking of 95,000.

The blogs Technorati ranking has been used to rank 200 Travel and Tourism Blogs on the T-List and the Europe a la Carte blog is standing at no 76.

Now I know this sounds rather like sour grapes but I know of several blogs who have greatly boosted their Technorati rankings by big link exchange campaigns with any inrelated blogs. Well if it works so well, why haven’t I done it?  Basically I wanted to keep my links in context.  I’d rather write good content and have natural links in related blogs.  Am I a purist fool?