Blog Carnivals: can they pimp a pillar post?

carnivalOne thing that annoys me about blogging is how ridiculously update-centric it is. It makes sense if you have a breaking news blog with heaps of daily readers, but most of us don’t.   So why are people only interested in one’s latest posting?  I’d like to get a little more bloggerific juice out of an article I spent several hours writing and a lifetime accumulating the knowledge for  than just a couple of comments the first day it comes out.     I’d also prefer to move away from linkbait such as Eleven Signs that your blog sucks. I know my Entrecard droppers liked that one, but I want to write more serious and technically focused articles that will never be popular in the general blogosphere.

Shouldn’t a solid technical “pillar” post be just as good now as it was when it was posted four months ago? Such an article might stand a chance in its narrow niche if they ever found it, and therein lies the rub!     Pillar posts are designed for direct search engine traffic,  but if you’re not one of the big boys with mega-PR already , your “pillar post” will be pushed down  into last week’s stale news heap before it has a chance to generate any back links.  How do you get your pillar post on an upward, rather than go-nowhere trajectory?

To  address these issues we have blog carnivals, and I decided to experiment. A blog carnival is a special post on a narrow topic consisting of nothing but summaries and links to external posts on that topic.   A blog carnival aggregator such as blogcarnival.com collects these links on behalf of the carnival host until the issue date.   If you ask for a link on a carnival, it’s only fair that you link back to the carnival.   For maximum results, it seems to me you should time your carnival link post to be published synchronously with the blog carnival issue containing your link.

OK Here goes! My first credit card security post is a very solid post that needs more reads. It is not going to make you widdle your Calvin Kleins laughing or titillate your fantasies about Angelina Jolie but it very well could prevent your identity being stolen. So I found a carnival focused on information security and submitted my link. This carnival is scheduled to release new issue on July first, so (assuming they accept my link) that’s when I will release this post. And then I’ll check the results to see if it did anything for me, and let you know.   Heck I might even try hosting my own carnival, who knows?

2 comments to Blog Carnivals: can they pimp a pillar post?

  • admin

    Oh the IRONY! When I first posted THIS POST, it was slow to take off, but is now one of my top performers overall, (even though nobody comments on it!) The post I was attempting to pimp, and the one I put in the blog carnival and linked to here is “meh”. That tells me that people who read THIS POST don’t even click through to it. And the carnival isn’t sending traffic to it either. Of course it’s a security blog carnival. Just proves the old saying: “No one cares about security.”

    Hmmmm…. and as for blog carnivals, perhaps people would rather read about them than actually go to one?

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