Monday, July 10, 2006

How could we improve the Carnival of Homeschooling?

The Carnival of Homeschooling started just over half a year ago. I am very pleased with the first six months. The carnival has introduced a lot of homeschooling bloggers to each other. The carnival has also exposed our blogs to people who don't homeschool. The average carnival seems to get over a thousand hits, and when Instapundit mentions the carnival it can get a couple thousand hits.

The Carnival of Homeschooling has been doing well. I want to see if we can do better. In the spirit of The Wisdom of Crowds I'm asking others for ideas. Do you have any suggestions on how to improve?


Here are a couple areas I'd like to some help and thoughts on:

How could we improve the exposure of the carnival? What could we do to get more people to come read the carnival?

How do we generate more cross traffic? There is value in supporting each other, but we shouldn't just preach to the choir. I would like to find ways to get the carnival mentioned in blogs (and other areas) that don't normally focus on homeschooling.

What are other areas in which we could improve the carnival?

Thank you for your thoughts and suggestions.


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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, education, ,

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Henry & Janine, first off, thank you for starting the CoH 6 months ago. I have thoroughly enjoyed it, both as a reader and as a host.

The blogging world is so vast, and I would love to hear ideas on how to promote the Carnival beyond the normal homeschool blog readership. I seem to spend most of my blog reading time on other homeschool blogs, so I am not as familiar with some of the other bloggers, except the really big ones.

As a host last week, I liked the form that was created and utilized for some of the submissions. It made the job as host a bit easier.

Have a blessed day!
Tami

Anonymous said...

I think a good way to get the word out would be to have some graphics (buttons, blinkies, badges - whatever they are called)available for bloggers to put on their blogs - and link back to the main site, of course. I will make some and post them on my blog if anyone is interested.

You guys are doing a great job. As a first time homeschooler this year, I was thrilled to have come across this carnival.

gary said...

Hi Henry

The carnival has gotten better recently with the forms and better organization.

The idea of the button is a good one. We can make it even better if the button always linked to a redirect page maintained at the main carnival site. Therefore whenever a user clicks on that button they are taken to the latest carnival.

It's hard to think of any other improvments. It's great now.

Shannon said...

Hi Henry & Janine - you both have done a wonderful job getting the word out and getting the carnival hosted at a variety of blogs.

As for getting the carnival mentioned on blogs that are not homeschool focused, it may be useful to target blogs that share the values of homeschoolers. A good portion of the general public still looks at homeschoolng as "weird." But if we find a way to show them that we share a common goal (some examples that pop to mind are hands-off government, religion, or attachment parenting), they may not see homeschooling as so bizarre. In spreading the word about the Carnival, we may also enlighten people to the options that are available in providing their children with an education.

Another idea would be to really limit posts to a theme. So, to use a simple example, a carnival themed around birds would contain posts about homeschoolers and bird-related topics. Then the carnival might be of interest to bird-related blogs. Of course, this would be REALLY hard because rarely do we have enough posts on one given subject to fill a carnival. As the carnival gets bigger, perhaps a host could occasionally request posts only a specific topic... but I'm not sure this would be practical.