Home Turf Media » Carnival

Carnival

Welcome to the Carnival of Cities

An Armchair Traveler’s Dream Come True

We’re a brand new carnival that featuring blog posts about, you guessed it, cities.

Read this post for some more background about the Carnival of Cities, and then you can submit a story to the Carnival of Cities.

*** The Carnival of Cities is dying to do some traveling…think your site would be a great destination? then let us know about it.

Upcoming Carnivals

There’s a carnival every Monday!

#47 Jan. 14, 2008 @ Mexican Pop Spot
#48 Jan. 21, 2008 @ Sandier Pastures
#49 Jan. 28, 2008 @ OPEN - Your Blog??? - Contact Jon Now
#50 Feb. 4, 2008 @ OPEN - Your Blog???

Submission Guidelines

Any blog post that features an aspect of a city, town or region. Any topic within a location is perfectly welcome.
One entry per person or blog per week…if you are prolific, then pick your best
Submit high quality posts, the editor will feature the top posts in a way that they will likely receive the most attention.
Submit recent posts only, from the last week or two are preferred. We’ll consider older posts but if they at all seem to be outdated, we’ll take a pass.
Sorry, this carnival accepts entries from blogs only [sites with: chronological archives, comments, trackbacks etc.]
Don’t submit stories that are advertisements; we respect our readers and won’t include then in the carnival.
It is a lot of work to compile the carnival entries, so please have your entries in by 2pm Eastern time on Sundays.
Family friendly posts please.

Participation Guidelines

When the Carnival of Cities goes live each Monday morning, if your entry has been accepted, you will receive an email with a link to the carnival. It is encouraged that you post about the carnival and send your site’s visitors to see the carnival. If everyone links up then everyone in the carnival benefits by getting new readers to their site.

Hosting Guidelines

We’re now accepting applications from blogs that would like to host the Carnival of Cities. Drop us a line and tell us about your site and ideas for the carnival.

Here’s some basic guidelines for hosting the Carnival of Cities

During the week before, announce to your readers that you will be hosting, and solicit submissions using this form.
Send the URL of the annoucement post to carnival-at-hometurfmedia.com so it can be recorded on the Blog Carnival site.
The Carnival must be posted by 9:00 am Eastern Time on the date assigned, usually a Monday, so it is ready for the start of the work day.
The host must weed out any multiple submissions, commercial advertisements, spam, scams or inappropriate articles.
The host must email all selected participants to inform when the Carnival is live. They should also be reminded to link in to the Carnival (and any other individual articles that they enjoyed) so that everyone benefits from reciprocal traffic.
Within the Carnival, hosts must link to the Carnival home page at some point and encourage people to submit a story for the next weeks Carnival (link to Blog Carnival form).
If there is a posted location to the next week’s carnival you could link to that site as a courtesy to the next host.
You’ll receive the submissions automatically via email during the week before (up until 2pm Sunday, the day before). A tip may be to begin to compile the post as a draft during the week as the submissions come in, that way you aren’t swamped if you get a lot, or if most arrive at the last minute.

These are strong suggestions for the host:

Email non-participating but friendly bloggers and press contacts to inform them when the Carnival is live.
Be creative. The more creative the form or metaphor, the easier it is to build traffic.
Introduce each article by the city that the story is referring to.
Have fun!

Welcome to Home Turf Media

You'll find a list of our sites, which span 4 continents, just below. If you have a great city based blog and would like to join forces with our network, or you think you'd enjoy blogging your city with us, get in touch.
We also take care of the Carnival of Cities, which you may be interested in...it's an armchair traveler's dream come true.