Weight was 179.5 pounds today so no change.
Links
No links this week so I’ll just include the links to carnivals we entered.
Carnivals
A quick word about these carnival links – bloggers enter carnivals to increase exposure to their blog and hopefully get more readers. One of the conditions of entering a carnival is that you have to link back to the host blog, which rewards them by giving them more incoming links which raises their “stature” in the eyes of Google.
In other words, by putting these links, here I’m not recommending them, but rather fulfilling an obligation. That said, if you are looking for new posts and new bloggers, carnivals are one of the best sources for those. The main negative of carnivals is that they don’t really exclude anybody based on quality so not all the posts will be very good. The “editor’s picks” are usually pretty good posts, but if you don’t like the same kind of posts as the host then even those posts might not be interesting to you.
The Carnival of Personal Finance was hosted by Gather Little By Little.
Festival of Frugality was hosted by Kyle at Rather Be Shopping.
Carnival of Money Stories was hosted by The Baglady.
The Carnival of Family Life was hosted by On The Horizon.
The Festival of Stocks was hosted by Value Investing.
14 replies on “Saturday Weigh-In and LinkStuff”
Are you hosting the Money Hacks Carnival this week? I forgot to enter into carnivals last week. 🙁
Yes, I am. It doesn’t go up till Wednesday so lots of time to enter.
Mike
Amen on the carnivals. I’ve soured on some of them due to the lack of filtering – too many of them have just become linkfests that don’t really provide much value. I’ve given up entering most of them these days…
Steve
Brip Blap: I agree. I mostly “forgot” due to filtering issues.
I still think there is value in entering the carnivals if you are trying to grow your blog. The reality is that it doesn’t take much time, so pretty much any traffic makes it worthwhile.
In my opinion, traffic from the carnivals is high quality traffic – usually blog addicts of one sort or the other, so they are probably more likely to become regular readers than from any other source.
A lot of the traffic depends on the placement in the carnival which is (mostly) luck of the draw. Some weeks really suck if you get buried in the carnivals, but it only takes the occasional editor’s pick to make it a good carnival for you.
That said, maybe just emailing a dozen larger blogs with your best post of the week might be a better bet? (I’ve never done that).
Mike
I hear ya Mike. Many sides to the carnival coin. Shall I email you my post? LOL (I’ve never done that before either…)
Squawk – sure, go ahead and email.
I was kidding. 🙂
I’ll go walk the dog to find some inspiration.
Haha – sorry, I thought you meant you were going to email your Money Hacker submission…
If you want to email your best post, I can forward it to a real blog that might actually be able to give you some exposure! 🙂
@Mike: Well, true, there is some value. When I get editor’s pick I do notice an uptick in traffic and that’s worth something. Some of the bigger carnivals have just become too painful for me to slog through, and hosting one? Argh.
I’ve only tried mailing bigger blogs once – I tried to get Lifehacker to look at one of my posts. No luck, yet 🙁 but maybe one day 🙂
Brip Blap & Mike: I’m looking into hosting a carnival. Not sure which one to start with, thinking smaller is better. Like Money Stories or Hacks?
Squawk – I would go with Hacks or Frugality since it’s a pretty good carnival and easy to get a hosting position. Money Stories isn’t defined properly.
CoPF is tough – you might be too “new” to get it.
You seem pretty organized which is the main weapon when doing a carnival – they aren’t that hard.
Yeah, what Mike said – CoPF is probably booked for the forseeable future. I’ve hosted P2P lending and the carnival of financial goals – both are manageable in size. Host a small one and get an idea how it works before you tackle the CoPF or the Festival of Frugality or one of the big ones.
As a side note, I did not really enjoy hosting. I like those two carnivals, and I think they are good, it’s just that carnival hosting is not enjoyable for me.
Steve
Interesting – I rather enjoy hosting.
The two things I like best about hosting are
1) coming up with, and working on a theme
2) rejecting submissions 🙂
Things I like least about hosting:
1) reading all the posts. 🙂