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Here are four excellent examples of blog carnival link posts in different styles:

• Byteful Travel Blog Carnival #6 showcases travel-related posts, and breaks them up into sub-topics (travel photography, etc.). Each featured post includes a quote and is given plenty of space, with photos interspersed. The result is a very readable post, despite its length.
• Blawg Review #311 focuses on law blogs (blawgs) and is loosely organized in a logical progression, which is fairly impressive given the breadth of specific topics included, and is more conversational than some of the other examples.
• The Carnival Of Education: Week 22 is an old post (so don’t get too caught up in the talk about “My Space.com”) that manages to be almost editorial thanks to its author’s thoughtful additions to each link. This one is denser than most, but would be perfect on a “deep thinking” kind of blog.
• Best of Money Carnival – Memorial Day Edition is a little different because it follows a top-ten style. The Best of Money Carnival limits the number of featured posts to ten, no matter how many submissions they receive (in this case, 40), so the format makes sense. It takes some guts to rank other people’s posts, but the result is much more useful for your readers, so give it some thought.

If you’d like to participate in a blog carnival yourself, most of them accept submissions of relevant blog posts. Just visit the blog carnival directory, find one or more carnivals that fit your topic, note the deadline on your calendar, and give them your best post.

You could do this in a bunch of creative ways, from writing blog posts using them as case studies to doing a Twitter shout-out.

Today, we’re going to look at a simple, quick way to give a reader the warm fuzzies. Here’s the process:

1. Look through your comments for people who included a URL.
2. Visit the URL, and if it’s a blog, leave a comment.
3. If the site (blog or otherwise) is something you wouldn’t mind being loosely associated with, find something specific to compliment (whether it’s an idea in a recent blog post, the layout and colors, or even just a clever domain name).
4. Post your compliment publicly on Twitter or Facebook with a link. If they’re on Twitter or you’re Facebook friends, make sure you use the @ convention to mention them. (Need help on the @ convention? Let me know in the comments.)

What if you don’t have any comments?

Pretend you do, and make believe that they’re from the people you’d love to have as readers. However, err on the side of less-popular folks; the popular folks are already swarmed and may or may not notice even the sweetest, most heartfelt compliment.

This is a good time to talk about posts you’ve enjoyed from not-yet-famous bloggers, and to creatively re-tweet links from people you enjoy following on Twitter.

Remember, it doesn’t have to take very long (and shouldn’t, in fact). It’s just an easy way to be generous.

If you read a lot of blogs in your area of interest before you started yours, you may already know who some of the top bloggers on your topic are. If not, one of the easiest ways to find them is Alltop (if you went through the ”ProBlogger’s Guide to your First Week of Blogging” course with me, this may be familiar).

Using Alltop is easy: just go to the main page and use the search box to search for your topic. If you have a very narrow topic, you might have to settle for a related topic; if your topic is broad or particularly popular, you may have lots of choices.

Once you’ve identified the right section of Alltop and gone to it, you’ll see a bunch of headlines from different blogs. Those are very likely the top blogs in your subject area. You can click on the blog title to go to the blog itself, and from there you can start your analysis.

Using Quantcast and Alexa

Darren’s suggestions for on-site analysis are a great place to start, and I don’t have anything to add to them.

I thought, instead, that I’d take a few minutes and record a video showing the kind of information you can get from other sources, specifically, Quantcast and Alexa.

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Consider this video your introduction. (And sorry the audio is so quiet… I don’t know what the deal is but I’ll try to improve it for future videos!)

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In this post, I’m going to focus on the aesthetics and interactions that make your list more appealing. I’ve picked simple things that won’t take much effort on your part (because if something is a pain, it tends to get abandoned eventually); there are other, interesting things you can do with more work, too, and I’ll briefly mention them.

First, the low-hanging fruit!

1. Use the actual list buttons to create a list. Yes, you can manually enter your list by typing “1. “, but using the button to manage it means the list is easier to update (have you ever had to renumber a list because you decided to insert a new “item #2″?!), and most of the time the list will be indented and generally formatted more nicely—automatically.

   What button, you ask? This one: 

   More specifically, there are two buttons. The first one is for a bulleted list (an “unordered list”), and the second (the one I’m clicking in the screenshot) is for ordered (numbered) lists.

2. Use your formatting options. As you can see, I like to set apart the main point of each list item by making it bold. A hint: you can also add line breaks within a list item (as I did in the previous one) by holding down your “shift” key while pressing the “enter” key.
3. Use images when appropriate. You can use WordPress’s image uploader and feature thumbnails, or even create a whole gallery. If you have detailed images and a thumbnail won’t suffice, you can use a plugin like Fancyboxify to attractively display the larger image when the thumbnail is clicked.
4. Use plugins that suit your content. Just like the Fancyboxify makes images more functional, there are plugins that visually highlight other kinds of content. Reporting on what people said on Twitter? Try Twitter Blackbird Pie for gorgeous, customized graphics. Featuring code? Use WP SyntaxHighlighter to display it with proper color highlighting and make it easy to copy and paste at the same time.

There are other things you can do, of course. If you’d like to show people the target website when they slide their mouse over a link, you could look into “Snap Shots.”

I also sometimes like to use fancy graphics in place of bullet points (for example, a checkmark); as of this writing there’s no plugin to do that, but a lot of themes offer it out of the box, or you can DIY it if you’re comfortable with code.

But even if you just follow the four tips above, you’ll be ahead of the class, and your readers will thank you for it by staying longer and reading more.