Blog Carnivals

Carnivals are just one way to promote your blog. From blogrolls to link exchanges to linkbaiting to just buying advertising, there are dozens of good ways and quite a few not so good ways to build traffic. One important technique in writing good carnival posts is to write a title which attracts attention. You need to grab the attention of the carnival host quickly to get listed and hopefully get an actual review instead of a one line link. Then your title needs to grab the attention of the reader scanning through 10 to 100 links so the reader will check the review and then click through to your article.

The same advice on titles goes for the first traffic builder in the Not-a-Carnival category: BlogRush. [Referral link. Please use it if you do sign up.] BlogRush puts a widget on your site which streams the RSS headlines for five other blogs in your niche on your sidebar. You get credit for each widget impression and the credits result in your title running on the network. There’s some negative buzz running about BlogRush right now, but my overall impression running it on Financial Options has been good. It hasn’t exploded my traffic, but combined with good Google search results for a couple of good titles I’ve written in the last week my traffic has nearly doubled. (Search engines get about 75% of the credit, BlogRush about 25% and neither would have happened without good titles.)

Some of the negative buzz seems to be related to the one thing you can always expect with something new - people trying to game the system. The owners report that they are working out kinks to eliminate abuse. Another thing that sticks in some folks craw is the fact that BlogRush users get referral credits for people who sign up through their invitations. There’s also a certain sense that we’ve been here before with traffic exchanges. Is this just a newer, slicker version of something we’ve already tried? Maybe. But the biggest problem is probably that people aren’t seeing the kind of traffic that they’d like when they first sign up. I’ll attribute this to three factors.

1. The system’s new and they are working out the kinks
2. There are extra impressions built in for the referral levels and those aren’t being used yet by most users
3. Bad headlines

One key aspect to remember on BlogRush is that the titles have to be under 40 characters or roughly 7 words. This is good advice for carnivals and search engine optimization, too. For carnivals, succinct titles are important to grab the host’s and reader’s eyes. For search engines, a shorter title that uses the most relevant keywords from your article will reinforce those keywords better than a rambling title that dilutes them. More importantly as search engines get smarter, what’s good writing for humans, and good titles is, is good writing for search engines as well. As SnowBoardJohn puts it:

Don’t lie in your Blog Rush headline. People will not only hit the “back” button faster then greased lightning if your story doesn’t deliver on what the headline promised, but they will be FAR LESS LIKELY to click on your future headlines.

I’ve found in the niche where I’m using BlogRush, finance and economics, that the widget is also a good fit for the site. The titles that have been appearing have offered some good added content for my readers. There is also a bit of spammy type stuff slipping in there, but I give my readers credit for being able to discern for themselves how far down that path they want to go. The actual story titles contribute far more to my blog than a collection of static links to blog names like Five Cent Nickel that don’t tell readers much or do much to draw their attention. (No offense to Five Cent Nickel, it’s one of my favorites in the category which is why I chose it.) Perhaps that’s a good thing for me, not sending readers off to other places, but I like to think that having good outgoing links adds to an overall good experience that will have readers coming back.

All told, readers should take away two things from this. First and most important, whether you choose to use BlogRush or not, writing good headlines is essential for bringing eyeballs to any website. Second, don’t focus solely on carnivals as the way to build traffic; there are plenty of options out there. Give them all a try, use appropriate techniques to grab reader attention and build those reader numbers over time by offering good quality content that starts with well written titles.

If you decide you would like to try BlogRush, please consider using my invitation link - click here to join BlogRush.

Technorati Tags: BlogRush, titles, traffic