Do you have a weblog for your SMB (small to medium business)? Want a no-cost, effective way to promote your weblog and thus your business? Do you have a couple of hours per week to spend doing a bit of promotion?

The answer is Blog Carnivals, and you can utilize them in two effective ways:

1. Submitting articles to get exposure at “host” weblogs.
2. Hosting a carnival, which draws web traffic and hyperlinks from other weblogs.

Here are some of the benefits of participating in blog carnivals:

1. Have an inexpensive (as in free) way to promote your weblog, website and business.
2. Gain exposure to other like-minded bloggers and possibly business owners.
3. Gain exposure to readers of other link-minded bloggers’ blogs.
4. Get links back to your weblog, which builds both reader traffic and authority in the search engines.
5. Gain authority about a certain topic, either by submitting quality articles, or by choosing quality submissions for your own carnival. (There’s no rule that says you must accept everything, but be diplomatic about it. Or simply don’t mention anything that’s been left out.)

You do not necessarily need to start a new carnival. Search the massive list at the Blog Carnival website. Find a dozen or so suitable carnivals, preferably weekly, and try to submit your best article of the week to your list.

Note: Many carnival hosts do not like multiple submissions from one blogger for the same edition. Err on the side of caution and only submit one per week, if a carnival is weekly. Some are bi-weekly or longer between editions. So if you start submitting to a lot of carnivals, track submissions in a spreadsheet. I like to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets because you can click on an URL and have a browser window open to that page. Everything stays in a browser framework. This makes it far easier track and submit articles each week, especially if you use a multi-tabbed web browser such as Mozilla/ Firefox, Netscape or Opera.

If you want to host a carnival, check existing ones. Hosts will often state that they’re looking for rotating hosts. If you don’t find anything suitable, you can consider starting your own carnival. However, before you do, consider a few things:

1. Build a bit of authority for your blog first, possibly by submitting to carnivals for a few weeks.
2. It takes time to look over entries. You could cheat and let every submission in. The Blog Carnival has a new feature where they automatically generate the HTML code for a carnival edition based on all pending submissions. It takes 5 seconds instead of a an hour or more to read entries. But if you do this, without filtering entries, you may end up with some poor quality articles and thus lose any authority your blog has gained.
3. Don’t be afraid to reject a submission if it does not seem relevant or is just an article trying to sell something via an affiliate link. People make mistakes or just don’t followed instructions about what type of articles a carnival is looking for. One oddity taking place is use of software that chops up a real article and rearranges it into what appears to a new article. And then someone will submit this to a carnival You do not want to publish links to this sort of garbage.

It takes a bit of effort and organization, but if you utilize blog carnivals on a regular basis, it can be a powerful way to build up your weblog and business.