Blog Carnivals

I run a weekly series on my finance blog, Financial Options, of financial roadmaps. These posts contain a calendar for the week with economic indicator releases, Treasury (T-Bill, bond and note) auctions and announcements, and earnings reports with some of my comments about what’s going to drive markets in the coming week. I submit the latest version each week to a variety of financial and business related carnivals each week. My strategy here is to submit a resource that will be useful for carnival readers, bloggers and the carnival hosts themselves. My goals for the submissions reach beyond the carnivals to:

1. Point this calendar out as a resource to the financial bloggers hosting and submitting to the carnivals
2. Gain a few readers each week from the blogs that host the carnivals
3. Add several new incoming links to the series each week

Let me address these backwards…

Point three is probably the least important and effective as I suspect that links in blog carnival posts are not given much authority by search engines. If nothing else, the sheer number of links in a blog carnival post dilutes the value of any one link, even if the host is a highly ranked site. That said, from a search engine optimization standpoint, if everything else is equal, you don’t want your competitor to have a hundred carnival links while you have none.

Point two is important, but a very slow process. I don’t expect to gain hundreds of regular readers from carnivals. Some of the carnivals I submit this to are very new and the older carnivals have dozens of links or more. Still, this is a high value topic, so if I pick up two or three new regular readers each week through carnivals, after a year that is worth a lot.

Point one is the main reason for this exercise. The bloggers hosting these carnivals are all people who are working very hard to gain recognition for their work in the same field. There’s simply no better way to become “the authority” than to have the experts in the field referring to you as a resource. I want these hosts to refer to my site, and especially this series, the next time they need an explanation of an upcoming economic indicator or the next time that the rapid fire coverage of an indicator on the news leaves them scratching their heads. I’m not shooting for the links in the carnivals, so much as the references and links that these carnival hosts will post later. These submissions have led to links from finance experts writing on sites like About.com.

The strategy here is not to submit a piece on the latest news that will shine for a few days, maybe get a few Diggs. The strategy is to submit one example of an ongoing series that can be a resource for readers and other bloggers over the long haul.

This week’s version is going to several carnivals (reviews of some of these to follow and I’ll link to those that post my link as they publish):

• Carnival of Real Estate Investing (There are three housing market indicators out this week)
• Carnival of Personal Finance (”The original money carnival”)
• Carnival of the Capitalists
• Carnival of Real Estate
• Festival of Investing

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