Hosting The Blog Carnival: What Do I Have To Do?

Not sure what to do as a host of the Business Mum’s Blog Carnival? Here’s what you need to know…

1. If you’d like to host the Business Mum’s Blog Carnival, send me a message. You’ll need to be a parent running a business and have a blog. (I know that sounds obvious, but I want to cover everything here!)

2. I’ll do a double-check to make sure you’re a parent and have both a business and a blog, then I’ll let you know which months are available. If we have hosts for many months into the future, I’ll add you to a reserve list and then let you know when a month becomes free. Either way, I promise to get back to you.

3. Once we’ve agreed between us which month you’ll be hosting, I’ll ask you for a deadline date, the date you’ll publish the carnival and the email address you’d like entries sent to. (2 dates and 1 email address).

4. I’ll then update the schedule with your details.

5.  The carnival is a quick, easy and free way of getting inbound links to your blog (good for SEO), it’s great for online networking and for getting new readers. But it does need a regular flow of posts, and comments on the posts to get these benefits. The more entries we get, the greater exposure our blogs will get and the more potential customers we will get to our websites. It would make a huge difference if you could enter the carnival regularly and mention it on your blog, Twitter, Facebook or any other channels you use because combining our networks and efforts will make promotion much more effective.

6. A week before each Carnival, I publish a post on Business Plus Baby and I start to Tweet about it and mention it on my Facebook page. To spread the word as far as possible (and increase the number of entries), it would be incredibly helpful if you could do the same.

7. You’ll get links to lots of fabulous posts emailed to you from lots of equally fabulous business mums.

8. Write a post for your blog which pulls together all the links in a vaguely interesting way. Don’t worry, you don’t have to be wildly creative (you can find the links to the previous carnivals here)! In your post encourage readers to leave comments on the blog posts in the Carnival. Comments show that your blog has readers and that always looks good on a business blog. (Well any blog, actually.) And if you leave a comment, the blogger will usually return the favour meaning that you get more comments too.

9. Hit that publish button!

10. Tell everyone on Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else you can think of that the Carnival is live. The more traffic we get, the happier we all are!