So after another swing at hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance, I leave (yet again) with the lyrical question, is it worth it? The easy answer is, not really. After the last Whine Filled Reaction, I should have known better, and I have concluded that Blog Carnivals are Done.
My view of hosting a Carnival is not simply to include 100 links to various sites, with no reflection that I read the posts. This does get me in trouble because a lot of the stuff submitted is SEO-laden posts to help get more readers to the site, or worse, simply articles that are selling things. Some posts are easy to remove, like the ones that don’t mention money at all (it is the Carnival of Personal Finance). Still, some so blatantly post with tons of links to make money or increase page rank (while lacking in any actual content), and hence the main reason Blog Carnivals are done.
This time I had very slim pickings, so I let in a group of posts that I would have usually thrown out, but I decided to comment on them, and hence I opened Pandora’s Box. I had complaints about being rude and a lot of chest-beating by one blogger in the industry, but I keep asking, “If you are a pro in the Financial Planning world, why are you using a Blog Carnival to promote your business.” Calling someone a “shameless self-promoter” is being rude. Fair enough, I rarely know how sarcastic I am being, but that is kind of my writing style (anyone who calls themselves the Clown Prince of Personal Finance cannot be viewed as being a kinder, gentler blogger).
I do enjoy Control Your Cash’s Carnival of Wealth for the reason that they are brutally frank about the posts submitted (even at times over the top for my tastes, which is saying something). Still, I suppose folks that offer things to that Carnival know what they are going to get.
The rest of the posts were mostly very same-ish to me, nothing that would cause me to want to read it (if I didn’t have to for the Carnival). Mostly middle-of-the-road commentaries, which are informative, but finance is a pretty dry subject (except for Personal Finance Bloggers, Accountants and such). Would someone not in the business want to read this? If they are looking for specific information, the answer might be yes, but I am skeptical.
Carnivals Dead?
My feeling is the concept of the Blog Carnival is primarily dead. There are very few that publish these days, and with Google changing their business models about linking and such, I can’t see this trend changing. I am not submitting much to Carnivals, and after seeing a Carnival of Personal Finance with 24 submissions, I suspect this may mean the end of this concept. Blog Carnivals are done, but what comes next?
Link Building Articles
- Link Building a Tutorial (Internal) a useful discussion of how to make sure your articles are well linked to each other.
- Link Building a Tutorial (External) the compliment of how to build internal links.
- Twitter Etiquette? (is that a thing?) Now that it is called “X” maybe there is no etiquette left?
- Guest Posts: Please Stop the Madness this is not the way, to quote the Mandalorian.
- Blog Carnivals are Done for building links, that is certain.
- Fix Those Broken Links there is no point in having a link if the Google Spider can’t find where you want it to go.
You may be right that carnivals are dead. Best of money carnival dies long back and now the biggest carnival is also dying.
I stopped participating in carnival type events years ago for some of the reasons you’ve given. Quality demands that submissions be worthy of inclusion. That means some can be rejected.