AMVA - Amanda Moore Virtual Assistant

Submitting to Carnivals can be time consuming, but if you set up a system, you can do it all in just a few minutes. Here’s my system for Quick and Dirty blog carnival submissions:

1. Go to the Blog Carnival website and look at their list of available Carnivals. You’ll notice that there are dozens of Carnivals to choose from. You could theoretically submit to them all, but that would be a waste of time so instead you…
2. Sort the list by Latest Edition. This will tell you which Carnivals are actually active. Then, you want to scan down the list for Carnivals that are appropriate for the specific post you’re submitting. If you are submitting a post about SEO and How to Increase Page Rank, you don’t want to submit to the Canine Carnival. That’s just a waste of everyone’s time.
3. Open the Carnivals that look like they’re appropriate for your post. The best way to do this is just hold the Ctrl button and click on the link. This will open the page in a new tab. Do this for all of the Carnivals that look interesting and have been published in the last 2 months.
4. Re-sort the list by Next Edition. This will catch the carnivals that only publish on a quarterly (or longer) basis. Repeat step 3 above.
5. Read the Carnival Summary. This is important. Sometimes, from the name, you’ll think the Carnival is about one thing when it’s really about something completely different. If it’s not appropriate to your post, don’t submit your article.
6. Submit your post to the first Carnival only. If you’ve read the summary and you think that your post is appropriate for the Carnival, go ahead and click on the Submit An Article button on the left side. Now here’s the important part: before you submit any posts, bookmark the submission page. This will make it much easier in the future when you want to submit again. Fill in the information with the appropriate permalink and your contact information and hit submit. Don’t forget to include strong remarks as that’s what will get many people to read your post before others.
7. Submit your post to all of the other Carnivals. By completing the entire submission process with the first Carnival, you’ve just decreased your work because now certain information will pre-populate, based on what you posted in the first carnival. Now, to save time, instead of completing each Carnival one at a time, do the following:
   • paste your permalink into each carnival and hit tab, then move on to the next submission form. When you’ve placed your permalink into all of the Carnivals, go back to the first and you’ll see the info that has auto populated.
   • fill in the missing information but before you hit submit, copy each piece of information and paste it into the appropriate field on each Carnival submission page. Do this with all of the fields and after you’ve filled in the Remarks box on each, hit submit. Doing this cutting and pasting will save you a lot of time rather than re-typing the same information for each Carnival.

Once you’ve gotten your regular Carnival submissions bookmarked as outlined above, any time you want to submit to a Carnival all you have to do is check the site once a week for new Carnivals. Just repeat steps 1-4 above and look for the “new” icon. Be aware that Carnivals are listed as new for a while so make sure it’s not one you already submit to and then just follow the rest of the steps.

By following this process, I can submit to about a dozen different Carnivals in 10 minutes or less. I just go to my bookmarks page and right click on the “Carnivals” folder. Then I click “Open all in Tabs” and the Carnivals automatically go to the submission page. Then I just follow steps 6-7 above.

Blog Carnivals can be an excellent way to gain rank, authority and readers, just don’t expect it all to happen in one day.

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