Lesson number one in the OPRApprentice world, never take the bloggosphere world for granted! I first became introduced to the terms, “blog carnivals,” “memes,” and “Mr. Linky’s” during the first week of my internship. If I thought I was blog savvy before but I can certainly say that this changed that thought instantaneously. Call me old-school, but I wasn’t too sure what they were, who used them, why people used them, and how they worked. I’m only now at the beginning stage of learning about these useful tools.
The world of blogging is so incredibly comprehensive, and the the blog carnivals, memes, and Mr. Linky’s only help in trying to get your blog out there. The website 5minutesformom.com gives us beginners a glance at the meaning of these terms. Utilizing these three tools will help any blogger get more exposure, so I’m going to attempt to break down the meaning of each tool for all the beginners out there!
Blog Carnivals
They’re sort of line online magazines – each has a particular topic of interest (philosophy, cats, progressive politics – you name it, it’s there). The carnivals are published on a weekly/monthly basis depending on who’s hosting them.
The name is derived from the fact that each carnival moves around from blogger to blogger. There isn’t only one person responsible for the publication of the blog carnival, which is beneficial for all of those involved because it helps drive traffic to their respective sites.
The benefits of contributing to a blog carnival are the same as hosting one – exposure, exposure, exposure!
Look out for outdated carnivals. Make sure the topics you are searching are up to date!
Memes
These are tools that bloggers can use to help generate story ideas. A blogger, like myself, can post a series of questions, say about online public relations, and people who search for a meme of this topic would post their answers onto their blog and then link back to my own.
Bloggers that start a particular meme can tag others so that they can get an automatic crowd interested. The people who they tag are generally bloggers who follow the initial blogger. The bloggers who are tagged in a meme also generally respond.
Memes tend to have fun themes like Freebie Friday, Tacky Tuesday, and so on.
Mr. Linky
A rather beneficial application (or widget for the web-term savvy) that one can put onto their site so that others can leave their links to show their interest in the blog topic.
Using a Mr. Linky on your page not only helps you gain exposure, but it helps you gain more followers. For those of us who use WordPress for your site, know that there’s also a plug-in available for you!
If you have more of an insiders definition of these terms, please feel free to add a comment below!
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2 Responses to “Blog carnivals, memes, Mr. Linky’s? – Oh my!”
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April 18th, 2010 at 10:22 am
You should check out Linky Tools… we have a bunch of different type’s of linky tools including a fantastic thumbnail linky. We work hard to respond to our users and constantly improve our tools which is the reason why we are the most popular and fasting growing linky tool on the web.
Brent Riggs – http://www.linkytools.com – brent@brentriggs.com
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April 18th, 2010 at 10:23 am
PS. 5MinutesForMom uses Linky Tools…
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