I decided to take things a step further and make it very clear what was to be expected of people submitting to the carnival.  I drafted a set of blog carnival rules and added a check box on the submission form that indicated that they accepted the rules.  The rules could be used as screens by the hosts.  Don’t follow the rules, and it’s an easy rejection.  It makes the host’s job much easier, which is a good thing for a carnival manager.

What I regret it that I didn’t do this a long time ago.  My aunt, who was a health teacher, always said that it’s far easier to be strict at the beginning than it is to get stricter later.  The Best of Money Carnival started things off on the right foot with very clear rules.  Hosting that carnival was a breeze, and I hope that hosts of my carnival find it just as easy.

This is refreshing.  A lot of blog carnivals are becoming nothing more than link dumps.  Hosts have had it, and managers have had it.

Some of the advantages of a limited-post, quality-based carnival:

• Filtering. The host has filtered out the riff-raff and the mediocre.
• More traffic for those accepted. Being one of ten posts is better than being one of a hundred.
• Less wasted time. You may miss a few good posts that didn’t quite make the cut, but it’s unlikely that you’ll sit through any bad ones.
• Self-selecting.  After getting turned down a dozen times, spammers might turn to greener pastures.
• Construction of the carnival is easier and faster. Less typing.

If your niche is being overrun with link-dump carnivals, consider starting your own Best Of carnival!

Check out Holiday Insights.  They have a big list of unusual holidays.  I had no idea that today, February 24th, is National Tortilla Chip Day.  I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.  Think you could theme your carnival around the humble tortilla chip?  A Doritos® extravaganza? Or maybe just a bunch of corny jokes?

This is a way to do something a little unexpected for your carnival.

Honestly, I thought submitting articles to different blog carnivals was pretty easy, but this tool appears to make it ridiculously easy.  Maybe almost too easy.

I asked a question of a guy who had a “blog carnival submission service” and asked him to clarify what his service was all about.  For $25/month, he will submit one URL per week to 15-20 carnivals.  I didn’t ask — I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t tell me anyway! — but Xingla Pro 3 would be a great way to make this kind of business really easy.  Select 15-20 carnivals, load up the URL and other information, push a button, and bingo!  Bulk carnival submission!

Or just spamming?

My Carnival of Debt Reduction is one of the easier ones to submit to at the moment.  I don’t require much of anything yet of the submitters, nor of the hosts.  (I’m thinking of asking hosts to link to my latest debt reduction tips because it seems a little less demanding to ask them to link to a post with actual information than to link to the homepage.)  But anyway, I know other managers don’t allow submissions to their carnival to go to other carnivals, and others that require a back link to the carnival homepage from the host.  This makes me a target for less discriminating carnival submitters.

So, is a tool like Xingla Pro 3 good or evil?  I think it does what it does well.  Ultimately this kind of backlinking strategy might backfire, but who knows?  In any case, if carnival managers don’t set the standard for what constitutes a valid submission to their carnival, they probably deserve to be hit with bulk submission tools like this, and they’re setting up their hosts to deal with a lot of junk.

Why not?

Clever Dude has done this as a way of rounding out the year and for highlighting his best work.  Today saw the 2008 Carnival of Clever Dude, with all of the best and most clever things on the topic of, well, Clever Dude.

This is a cool idea to do once in a whle.  Once a year certainly isn’t too much.  Maybe even once every six months.  Much more often that and you risk appearing like an egotist.  Strangely, though, it seems like bloggers can get away with reviewing their best work more often if it’s billed as “digging into the vaults” or “one year ago today.”  Other bloggers do this to good effect.  But there’s something about spotlighting yourself in a Carnival that is a bit over the top, and gets old if done too often.

Anyway, consider whether it’s worth your while highlighting a Carnival of You.  It could be fun!

A reasonable backup plan to handle submissions is to post an e-mail address to send the submissions to, and ask for blog name, blog URL, post name, post URL, blogger name or screen name, and any remarks about the post.  That covers most of the important things a host would need to put their carnival together.

This will work, but it can suffer from being a little bit too free-form.  A better solution is to set up a submission form on the website with specific fields and with form validation.  This requires a bit of scripting to pull off, but I found a great Wordpress form generator that let me roll my own submission form for the Carnival of Debt Reduction.  It’s the Secure PHP Form Mailer Script by Dagon Design.

Here’s what I did to put together the form you see here:

• I downloaded the script, unpacked it, uploaded it to my wp-content/plugins directory, and activated it.  Standard plugin installation.
• I signed up for a Recaptcha account for my spam retarder.  This gave me the two keys I needed for the plugin.  I selected the Recaptcha option and entered the two keys in the  Plugins -> DFFM-Main section in the Settings tab of my Wordpress admin section.
• I edited the submit page and added the code <!– ddfm1 –> to that page where I wanted the form to appear.  
• I clicked on the DFFM1 tab to customize the form.  For what you see on that form, this is what I put in the Form Structure portion:

type=text|class=fmtext|label=Your Name|fieldname=fm_name|max=100|req=true
type=text|class=fmtext|label=Email|fieldname=fm_email|max=100|req=true|ver=email
type=text|class=fmtext|label=Blog Name|fieldname=fm_blog_name|max=100|req=true
type=text|class=fmtext|label=Blog URL|fieldname=fm_blog_url|max=100|req=true
type=text|class=fmtext|label=Post Title|fieldname=fm_post_title|max=100|req=true
type=text|class=fmtext|label=Post Permalink|fieldname=fm_permalink|max=100|req=true
type=text|class=fmtext|label=Post Trackback|fieldname=fm_trackback|max=100|req=false
type=verify|class=fmverify|label=Verify
type=textarea|class=fmtextarea|label=Remarks|fieldname=fm_remarks|max=1000|rows=6|req=false

• And here’s what I put into the Message Structure portion:

Someone has submitted a post to the Carnival of Debt Reduction!

Email: fm_email
Blog Name: fm_blog_name
Blog URL:  fm_blog_url
Name/Nickname: fm_name
Post Title: fm_post_title
Post Permalink: fm_permalink
Post Trackback: fm_trackback
Remarks:  fm_remarks

Thanks!

• Those two points above are what define it as a carnival submission form.  I think the rest of the options on the form customization page are self-explanatory and they’re best learned just by playing with them.
• One slightly-tricky thing I did was to change the text in the button to “Submit” rather than the default.  The fix is to change one of the identifiers in the lang/English.php file:

define(’DDFM_SUBMITBUTTON’, ‘Submit’);

And that’s mostly it.  This is a decent way to get a carnival submission form up and running on Wordpress.  Hope this helps you manage your carnival better! 

A number of bloggers I respect have figured this out already, and they’re fairly reluctant to host a carnival anymore.

They understand the benefit of regular submission to blog carnivals: free backlinks.

The host gets a few things out of the carnival, mainly a little bit of traffic over the course of the week that they host the carnival, and a bit of exposure for their blog.  The people who submit to the carnival get a permanent benefit of a backlink that usually means an incremental amount of SEO benefit.  If their post is really good, they may get additional traffic if the host makes that post an editor’s pick, but that is small compared to the long-term benefit of the backlink.

I see hosting as becoming more of a small blog’s game, and this is unfortunate.  My main blog is reasonably old by personal finance blog standards, but I’ve gotten on board to host a number of carnivals over the next three months or so.  Some of my colleagues who have gotten a bit bigger than myself (currently at 3,000 subscribers) seem content to submit to several carnivals, sometimes with posts from several of their blogs, and rarely host any on their main blogs anymore.  And, frankly, I don’t blame them!  That’s the smart way to game the blog carnival system.

Some carnivals strongly encourage backlinks to the carnival from participating blogs; others require it.  I applaud those who require backlinks as a contingency for participation in future carnivals, mainly for the reason that it keeps the hosts from feeling like they’re being used too badly.

I still have some interest from people who want to host the Carnival of Debt Reduction but for some reason it seems to be a little bit harder to get people to step forward than it used to be.  Maybe folks who host the carnivals see the diminishing return for the effort they put out.

This seems to be an issue that carnival managers need to take on.  Some managers have implemented a "terms and conditions" clause in submitting to their carnival in order to establish some accountability for linking back.  For managers reliant on BlogCarnival.com like myself, the best we can do at the moment is to add a clause in the submission instructions.

A key ingredient of blog carnivals is the hosts, and convincing potential hosts of a carnival of the benefits of hosting is getting more difficult.  It’s necessary to put measures in place to keep people from taking advantage of the hosts too badly.

Interspersing a few interesting facts about a timely topic, regardless of whether that topic is closely tied to the particular blog carnival, dresses it up substantially.  It’s way better than a bare list of links.

Here’s how I’ve done it:

• Choose the topic.  Around this past Independence Day I did an American Flag themed Carnival of Personal Finance.
• Go to Wikipedia.  This is often a great place to get general-interest information on a particular topic.  This topic was no exception.
• Read the entry and pick out four or five somewhat connected pieces of information.  Write a few sentences on each piece of information.  (Don’t just cut and paste from the article!)
• If there are images available, great!  If they’re public domain, even better.  That’s how the flags were.  I uploaded them to my server.
• Break up the posts with the themed pieces.  This makes the carnival read a bit more like a story, for a fraction of the effort that it would take to write the entire carnival in story format.
• As an added touch, tie in the theme of the carnival to the e-mail you send to the participating blogs.

Themeing your carnival this way is a low-cost way to get a fair bit more buzz.

If you repeatedly submit spam or overly commercial posts and the manager says that these types of posts are not appreciated, then you risk getting blacklisted.

If you are required to link back to the week’s carnival if your post is accepted, and you blow it off, then you risk getting blacklisted.

If you badger the hosts enough, they’ll get back to the manager, and you’ll get blacklisted.

If you complain to the manager too often, he/she may get really sick of it and blacklist you for sport.

Pay attention to the manager of the carnival, follow the directions, and nobody will get hurt!

The Carnival of Personal Finance has come to ask for hosts quarterly. He asks for hosts about a month in advance, then decides over the next couple of weeks who to have. The schedule is then ready to go for three months, and it’s pretty much smooth sailing from there.

My Carnival of Debt Reduction isn’t quite so big yet but here’s what I did the last time:

• I asked for hosts in a forum that is read by a lot of the bloggers in my niche. I received a number of requiests to host just from one post in the Money Blog Network Forums.
• After I assembled a bunch of interested hosts, I sent an e-mail (bcc to all of them) with a tentative schedule that took all of their requests into account.
• As people respond back to me, the hosting schedule takes form.

If your blog carnival has been around for a while then it makes sense to streamline how you set up your hosting schedule.