Business Blogging Carnival?
September 17, 2008 by Liz Fuller
Filed under Social Media
(www.businessandblogging.com) I always enjoy reading the blogs of readers who comment at business and blogging. I learn a lot about your views on blogging.
In order to share more blog posts with our readers, Laura and I have been discussing starting a business blogging carnival. (For those of you who don’t know – a carnival is a request for article submissions on a given topic. The hosting blog then provides links to a list of the submissions so that readers get exposed to a wider variety of articles and blogs.)
We’d like to gauge your interest and get your opinion on how it should be structured:
- First, should it be a weekly, monthly or quarterly carnival?
- Should it be a juried carnival in which only the top articles are included, or should all submissions be accepted?
- Should it be on any topic related to business blogging or should we choose specfiic topics?
- And last, what is your level of interest in reading the posts? and in writing the posts?
Once we hear what you have to say, we’ll let you know more details about the Business and Blogging Carnival.
photo credit: meagen
I think such a carnival would be a great idea. Yet I see it posted every two weeks or monthly. Once a week would be quite an effort I imagine. As for submission approval, I believe some kind of minimum requirements should be monitored, otherwise there’s a really strong chance to get tons of spam :)
Hi Liz,
Great idea! I was going to say once per week, but I think I agree with Alina — to start with anyway. You don’t want to commit to a tight schedule when you are relying on other writers.
On that note, I would recommend keeping as much control as possible. Set the topics (or at least have the opportunity to accept or reject queries), set the specifics (word count, etc.), and reserve the right to not run a post if it doesn’t meet your standards for any reason.
And set your deadlines way ahead of time. That way if a writer doesn’t deliver or if the post is not acceptable, you have time to fix it before “press” time.
That would be my advice anyway!
~Graham
I have to say that when Liz brought this idea up I was excited. We already get such great feedback from the Business and Blogging community and this is another way to put the spotlight on our readers.
Hi Alina
Good idea – maybe we could start it monthly and see how much work is involved. I have hosted carnivals on other blogs before but only on a rotating basis.
Hope you’ll be sending in submissions!
Liz
Hi Graham
Good suggestions! To keep it simple and fair for the bloggers, we’ll just ask for links to posts they’ve already written on their own sites. That way we’ll get to discover new sites – and they’ll get new readers.
I like the idea of having specific topics – any suggestions?
I hope we’ll be seeing submissions from you!
Liz
Hi Laura
Glad you’re still in favor of the idea! And feel free to submit posts from your other blogs as well! :)
Liz
Sounds like a great idea. I was going to vote for quarterly, because that way you can give writers plenty of time to come up with something and yourselves plenty of time to fix any problem submissions.
I agree that choosing a topic gives you better control over the process and has the added virtue of making the writer’s job a bit easier.
Hi Debbi
Thanks for the encouragement – keep an eye out for the announcement – hope you’ll participate!
Liz
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Did you get anywhere with this?