Automate your Blog Carnivals and writing projects with WP-Submission
Last week I ran across a new Word Press plug-in that can make running Blog Carnivals, blog writing projects and even link roundups effortless. Before I get into the plug-in, let me explain what blog carnivals, blog writing projects and link round ups are for our beginning bloggers.
Blog Carnival – A Blog Carnival is a collection of articles all related to a certain topic. The organizer of the Blog Carnival collects the submissions and posts them in a single blog entry. The entries include the title of the article which is linked back to the full article on the submitter’s blog, as well as a short introduction of the article. Blog Carnival’s are usually reoccurring and held on a predetermined schedule either weekly or monthly.
Blog Writing Project – A writing Project is similar a Blog Carnival with the difference being that a Writing Project is based on a specific topic that the owner of the blog having the writing contest, requests. Writing Projects are usually just a onetime thing and not held with any kind of frequency.
Link Round Up – A link roundup is a collection of articles that are collected by the blog owner. The blogger then creates a post with the title of the articles, who wrote them and links back to the original articles. This is still one of the best ways to link bait other bloggers in your niche and get noticed.
Now for the WordPress plug-in
WP-Submission is a Word Press plug-in that allows you to add a submission form to a post or a page and allow other bloggers to submit their article to your Blog Carnival or Writing Project. When the first entry is submitted a new post is generated and held in draft mode. Each additional submission is appended to the end of the post. When all the submissions are in you simply read through and make any changes to the post. Click publish and you’re done. It makes it so easy that you won’t have any reason not to do more types of these posts on your blog.
Kevin | October 18th, 2007 at 7:10 pm #
Sounds like a very handy plugin, particularly for a group writing project.
Have you used it yet? Does it do what it says on the tin?
jblanton (Post Author) | October 18th, 2007 at 10:04 pm #
So far I have installed it and ran a test on my development install of WordPress. Created a couple of submissions and published a post to see how it looks. Other than a slight tweak to the formating of the post it worked really well.
I should also mention that Chris Garrett http://www.chrisg.com/ was the one that thought this one up to be developed.
Chris Garrett | October 19th, 2007 at 5:08 am #
My secret is out
Yeah that is how I do my roundups. If you have any suggestions for improvements or even ideas for new plugins send them over to Damian, he is really helpful.
Blogcarnivals | October 19th, 2007 at 1:48 pm #
I just want to say that I have a blogcanival and adding your blog is just as easy..theres a guestbook that says add your blog here..just post your URL and your done…in fact you dont even need to give out your email,
so you never have to worry about returning spam..Just a great way to get free Blog promotion.