Good Blog Carnivals

[Andrew Michaels]

I was wondering if you guys have had good results for your blogs from blog carnival submissions. I tend to get perhaps 30 visits per carniva submission. Maybe I'm just missing the good ones. What are some popular personal development or personal finance (which I consider to be linked to PD) blog carnivals that you've had success with?

Thanks,
Andrew

[MartialDev]

My impression is that everyone loves writing them, few bother reading them.

Narrowly focused carnivals are probably your best bet. Even if they get less overall traffic, the people who do find them are less likely to ignore the contents.

Two examples of specific carnivals:
Bullying and Harassment Prevention
Qigong and Energy Arts Forum

[Andrew Michaels]

That has been my impression as well, but I know Steve urges bloggers to make use of them.

[AdamF24]

I don't ever receive much traffic off of them, but I do enjoy whatever boost it gives to my pagerank if the carnival doesn't use NoFollow.

[schola]

I've been submitting to them. While I don't get a flood of hits from them, I'm not expecting to. My blog is only 1 month old, so it suits my purposes just fine.

I read a good article the other day, I forget where. But the guys said getting involved in the blog community is key to making a name for yourself. You can't sit back and expect people to magically find your insightful little blog. You have to push it on them a little bit. Don't worry about traffic, worry about making your message clear and telling as many people as you can about it.

[Tayrak]

Another great thing about carnivals is that it's a targetted audience. You can generate traffic but if it's not in the theme of your blog it's a bit thin on how many people will like what they see and come back.
I ran into this, don't know if it's what you want but it sounds like fun: Blog Contests, Link Contests, Any Contests

[RichGrad]

I have found that they are good for building up pagerank (I started my Personal Development Blog in July and started participating in blog carnivals etc. Now I have got a PR3)

As for traffic, Martial's right. There are so many articles in a particular edition of a carnival that it's highly unlikely you will get read, unless you are one of the first few or you have a headline that draws readers in.