A couple of months ago, being even newer to blogging than I am now, I noticed that mention of a post on a carnival or festival seemed to cause a spike in visits to Funny about Money and sometimes a considerable jump in hits to the featured post. It occurred to me to keep track of this phenomenon. I wondered how consistently carnivals and festivals generated new traffic, to what extent, and which ones seemed to send the most visitors my way.
So, starting early in February, I submitted a post at every opportunity to every carnival that seemed even faintly relevant. I tried to send only posts that fit the carnival’s stated aims, and I resisted sending a single post to more than one carnival. I recorded the results in an Excel spreadsheet. As of today, I have two months’ worth of data.
Here are the results:
In February and March, I submitted 43 posts. Of these, six were rejected and two are still pending. In Excel, I recorded the number of hits to each post at the time the post was submitted to the carnival, and then the number of hits seven days later.
Over the two-month period, the subtotal for one-week increases in hits for all 43 posts was 2,753. The overall total number of hits for these posts, as of today, is 3,268.
So, Where Did This Traffic Come From?
The two carnivals that generated the lion’s share of hits were the Festival of Frugality and the Carnival of Personal Finance. That’s probably to be expected, because I write most often about personal finance, budgeting, and frugality. So far, the heaviest hitter has been Paid Twice, who linked to Make It from Scratch in the March 18 Festival of Frugality; over the following week, that post had 293 new hits. Broke Grad Student was the runner-up, mentioning Funny’s Ten Best Investments in Frugality in the March 4 Festival of Frugality.
Fifteen posts generated more than 50 new hits within a week after a carnival or festival mention. Since my blog is new and pretty obscure, I figured that was a pretty fair number. These 15 posts were featured at the Festival of Frugality, the Carnival of Personal Finance, the Carnival of Money Stories, and the Make It from Scratch Carnival. Two carnival hosts, Paid Twice and Mrs. Micah, put posts among the 15 top hit generators more than once.
What Types of Posts Seemed Most Popular?
Among the top 15 posts, posts elaborating on Funny’s Top Ten Money Principles tied for top place with more general articles, appearing three times among the top 15. Frugality and budgeting (which I think of as the so similar as to fall into the same category), rants, and idle essays each appear two times among the top 15, and household hints appears once.
Posts with titles suggesting the article will offer advice seem to rank the highest. Titles that promise lists may also attract readers; two of the top 15 are Ten Best Investments in Frugality and Six Easy Salad Dressings. Recipes are somewhat popular, with two submitted to Make It from Scratch appearing among the top 15.
Any Other Generalizations?
Evidently the number of hits generated depends on the carnival, on the host blog, and on the title of your post. Most-but not all!-of the top 15 posts were linked in carnivals hosted by blogs with substantial traffic. And certainly, for the type of writing I’m doing, the Festival of Frugality and the Carnival of Personal Finance are currently the most effective traffic builders. Carnival of Money Stories also was very good.
It’s possible that Whither America was mentioned on Digg, StumbleUpon, or a similar site. To date I’ve been unable to break in to iWeb’s code to enter the HTML these sites require for their spiders to detect Funny, and so as far as I know the blog is unknown to social networking sites. Also, I have had no time to explore the sites and establish a presence on any of them. For the same reason-the iWeb issue-Funny is invisible to Technorati. Yet Whither America got 275 hits within hours after posting-a phenomenal number for Funny. To this day, you can Google “Whither America” and still not bring up this post, and so I’m sure the hits didn’t come from random searches.
Speaking of Google, Funny is only three months old. But a couple of days ago, a search for “Funny about Money” brought the site up second to the top in Google’s list, even though iWeb will not accept Google’s code, either. I assume the steady accumulation of copy-I post one to three articles a day-and the growing number of links and hits must be responsible for this.
The Data
Here are the figures on the top 15 posts, showing the carnivals, hosts, and numbers, among other things:
Next, the carnivals to which I submitted posts and the number of posts I submitted to each over two months:
And finally, the top ten hit-generating categories…well, make that eight:
As you can tell, statistics was one of the courses I managed to evade as an undergraduate. I’m not a statistician; I’m not a mathematician; I’m an English major. So, any conclusions drawn here should be taken with a grain of salt!
Carnival of Debt Reduction, Carnival of Financial Goals, Carnival of Money Stories, Carnival of Personal Finance, Cavalcade of Risk, Carnival of Ethics, Values, and Personal Finance, Festival of Frugality, Make It from Scratch Carnival, Mom’s Blogging Carnival
6 Comments from iWeb site
That’s pretty neat. I’ve done some similar (but smaller) analysis to determine if it’s worthwhile entering in the carnivals. I think it is.
One thing about Google searches – make sure you sign out of any google apps (gmail etc) before you do that and even then, take them with a grain of salt – we don’t all see the same serps.
Mike
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 – 10:41 AM
GBlogger (Can I Get Rich On A Salary)
Your site is known to social media… I found you and this post through StumbleUpon! Great post, by the way.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 – 11:11 AM
I’m not a statistician either, but I love playing with numbers and the stats I have. 
Nice to know I’m not the only one.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 – 11:50 AM
A very interesting post.Although you are not a statician, your research and analysis convinced me of the benefits of participating in blog carnivals.I am the administrator of Mom’s Blogging Carnival and note that I did reject one of your submissions. Sorry about that,I receive so many submissions (some of them spam) for each fortnightly carnival, I can’t publish them all.Over time, I get to know the regulars and are much more likely to publish their posts than a blog I’m not familiar with.So please keep submitting.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 – 12:51 PM
Cool analysis. Honestly, I’m surprised to see that I sent you more new traffic than some of the more established blogs on the list, but I’m glad to send traffic to blogs with quality content like yours.
Thursday, April 3, 2008 – 11:13 PM
@ Deborah:By and large, the rejects deserved to be rejected! And yes, I surely will keep sending submissions.
@ Broke Grad Student: The title of that post was “My Ten Best Investments in Frugality.” In the magazine biz, the “XX best (worst) yy)” boilerplate is one of the easiest article types to pitch. Editors consider list-like articlesto be very popular among readers. Glance at magazines in check-out lines and you’ll see that almost every huge, mass-circulation rag has one or two of them featured among the cover lines. They’re thought to lure readers to buy magazines.
Where the carnivals and festivals are concerned, I think it’s a confluence of circumstances: the popularity of the carnival, the way the festival is presented on the host site, the size or entertainment value of the host site itself, and the title of the post. With this one, we have an allegedly fetching title (according to conventional wisdom), a very active festival, and a well-written host site whose name is recognizable.
Thanks for the good words from everyone!
Friday, April 4, 2008 – 07:08 AM
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