As most regular readers of the Crafty Princess Diaries knows, I am part of a loosely associated group of craft bloggers who exchange weekly links, very similar to the idea of a blog carnival, but we do it weekly. Our group is small, and we plan to keep it that way in order to keep the posted links more enticing for reader click-throughs, so we aren’t looking for new members right now. However, I thought it might be helpful to readers who have been curious about how it all works if I answered some questions about how and why you may want to start your own craft blogging group:

• What is the purpose of a group? Weekly linking is a good way to help promote fellow bloggers who have a similar readership base. Plus, blogging is all about linking and networking with those in the blogosphere, so a weekly organized group that posts weekly links is a great way to accomplish this. If weekly is too much, you could always do it bi-weekly or even monthly.
• Where do you set up a group? You can use any number of free services where members of your group can join and share links with each other. Yahoo and Google, for example, both offer this service.
• How do you get members to join? Our group is by invitation only, and I think this is a good way to go for what I’m talking about doing. This way you can get bloggers together who have similar goals, and it also keeps the number of members down, which as I said before is helpful for purposes of traffic. If you have super long posts with dozens of links, more than likely readers will not click on all the links. If you have a small number, the possible click-throughs will probably be higher.
• Where can you find members to invite? Check your blog roll first. Since most of us include bloggers on our rolls who we read and have similar points of views, that’s a great place to start. Once you get a few members from there to join, ask those members to make suggestions for additional members to invite to the group.
• How do you organize the weekly posting? This is something that is pretty subjective because there isn’t just one way to do this, but the way our group works is that we have files in our web area where we store links each week for each other to copy over to our post. We set specific dates for adding to folders and also for posting our weekly link posts.
• How many members should be in the group? Again, this can be subjective, but I think between 15 and 20 is a good number. This way, if some members can’t post (due to illness, travel, etc.) you won’t have to worry about not having enough links.
• What should members blog about? There are a number of approaches you can take. You can follow the idea of a carnival more closely and have a weekly question or theme, or you can just ask bloggers to post links related to any blog post they think is really good or interesting or something they want to generally promote.

There isn’t any one way to set up your own craft blog group, so just use my Q&A as a way to get started. You have to find an approach that works for your own personal blogging and crafting goals; however, blogging via a group is a wonderful way to use social media to promote your crafting career, so consider giving it a try.