Reasons to submit a post to the Carnival of Homeschooling

The basic reason for having a post on any carnival is it will lead to a temporary increase in traffic. If the visitors enjoy your spotlighted post, you will get some return visitors. (If you don't know how many visitors your blog gets, check out help.blogger.com. We use Site Meter.)

Let’s be honest. It isn't fun to stand in an empty room talking to yourself for hours and hours. Most of us are blogging because we want other people to read what we have to say.

Sometimes we just want to share with family and friends pieces of our lives. We want our loved ones to know about a cute thing one of our daughters did. Or we may want to share some thoughts and feelings with those we care about.

Many bloggers, myself included, want a larger audience. We're trying to enter into a dialog, and to influence or educate people about topics we are interested in. For those in the second group the only way to do this is to get people to read our blogs.

Sometimes random people may happen across our blog, and sometimes close friends and family will check it out, once in awhile. But to really have an effect, you need to work at increasing the traffic to your blog.

A carnival is one great way to do this. People will often read a blog carnival because they are interesting and they can be entertaining. A good blog carnival will bring a large crowd to the carnival post, and the viewers look at each booth to check out what is being offered. If you have an interesting post, some viewers will come back, again and again.

About 70,000 new blogs are created every day. True many of them are targeted for a limited audience, for family and friends, but there are still thousands of new blogs every day trying to catch the attention of blog readers. As Gilbert and Sullivan say in Ruddigore: "If you wish in the world to advance . . . you must stir it and stump it, and blow your own trumpet, Or trust me, you haven'ta chance!" "

So submit one of your best posts about homeschooling from this week to the Carnival of Homeschooling!