Tiffany Washko

One of my biggest “secrets” for blogging success involves carnivals and tours. Specifically I am talking about blog carnivals and blog tours and I as a blogger I don’t ignore either of these two important avenues for traffic generation and/or income.

The benefit of Blog Carnivals are really not touted enough in my opinion. They do many things for my blog…they increase traffic, they increase my technorati ranking and link popularity, and they increase my income. Blogcarnival.com is the main hub where you can find carnivals to join. Basically a carnival host sets up a carnival for a certain niche…let’s say green widgets. Then everyone who blogs about green widgets can submit their post to the carnival host for consideration. The carnival host chooses some or all of the submitted posts and creates a special article on their blog that links to all the submissions one by one. Readers that are interested in the subject of green widgets visit all the blogs that appear to have interesting green widget information…increasing your traffic.

If you join carnivals on a regular basis then you are constantly getting new links to your blog. Even if you submit to the green widget carnival every time they have a new edition (let’s say every two weeks) you still might be getting new links as many carnivals rotate hosts to spread the link love. Links to your blog increases your link popularity and potentially your search engine ranking. It also helps you to rank better with Technorati and that is good news becuase many blog ad networks and pay per post networks require a good tehnorati ranking to participate in their programs. Your technorati ranking can be directly impacting your ability to make money with your blog.

Blog Tours  can be very similar to a carnival. Sometimes they are just an organized group of bloggers that all post about a certain topic and link out to each other. I have participated in a few of those and I really like them. However, the type of blog tour that I was referring to above are organized groups that attract bloggers to review products. The blogger signs ups to participate in blog tours. Large companies and book publishers contact the tour organization to help them spread the word about their new product or book. The organization then solicits bloggers within their network to review these items and write reviews for their blogs. The bloggers that get accepted then get the review products via mail and they write their reviews according to the tour schedule.

The benefit to the blogger is free product, links from the tour organizer, and sometime compensation as well. I did a dozen or so blog tours last year and for half of them the biggest perk was free product but for others I got paid anywhere from $20-50 per tour with Amazon gift certificates and I got the free product. Last year I reviewed books, software, and food for the most part. Not long ago I got a free educational  computer program for my son and then I got paid to write about how he liked it. Pretty cool.

So if you want to get more out of blogging don’t forget to join the tour and go to the carnival.

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Technorati Tags: blog tour, blog carnival, product review, make money blogging