Welcome to Carnivalia (+ a few tiny blogger tips)

The RPG Blog Carnival for this month is going well! So far we have six submissions and a few promised more on the way (listed in the comments of the initial announcement). Major thanks go out to everyone who is making this great! The inaugural issue of the carnival has the topic "Character Death, Resurrection, and The Undead". Maybe I should have said "or The Undead", as blogging about all three can be daunting (even though some have already done just that). Personally, my own entry is going to be more about The Undead than anything else. So, I'm looking forward to more entries, especially as the closing date approaches (August 29th). Afterwords, I'll write up a summary of the carnival, complete with all the links, and then pass The RPG Blog Carnival off to someone else to host and choose a topic for issue #2. Any takers?

So, while I continue to write up the remaining sections for my carnival entry, I'll leave the RPG bloggers out there with a some tips I've picked up in the short time I've been blogging The Core Mechanic:

1. Use Google Blog Search with "link:yourblogsURLhere". For example, when I search "link:rpgbloggers.com/", it comes up with 45 entries - these are all blogs that are linked back to RPG Network. What's even cooler is that the search results for can also be syndicated as an RSS feed like this. You can even sign up for email alerts so that you will know as soon as someone links to your own blog.
2. Have some game advice? DM advice? original content? Submit your story to The Gamer Report. For example, when I submitted a story about my post on "Statblocks : They're just numbers on a page" my traffic doubled for the next two days. How did I know?
3. ... I use Google Analytics to track my blog's traffic. This is a must do. Although my traffic is still light, its still nice to see a week-by-week increase (percentage wise) in the total traffic I'm seeing. I can even "benchmark" my site's traffic against other RPG sites that "are of the same size" (whatever that means), which gives me something to shoot for.
4. StumbleUpon your own blog articles. Do you think you've written something that is good? maybe even useful to other RPG gamers? Well, there's nothing that says you can't StumbleUpon your own blog entry. This also has been a great way for me to boost traffic.

Well.. i gotta go run a gel.. So, in the meantime, what tips do you have that might be useful for other bloggers in our little community?