Start Your Own Blog with Blogger Blogspot

Have you thought about creating a blog but afraid it'll be too hard? Blogger (blogspot) by Google makes blogging easy enough that even with no technical computer knowledge, anyone can have a simple blog published within minutes. This article will guide you through the first steps in creating your blog.

Before getting started, you'll need to choose a name for the blog you want to make. Do you have a theme in mind? Will yours be a niche blog - cooking, gardening, photography - or random ramblings to keep up with friends and family? If your hobbies and interests aren't closely related, you might want to make a separate blog for each as they'll likely have different groups of followers; readers that love your poetry may not want to see photos of your pet snakes.

Once you've decided on a theme, pick a name for your blog and head on over to blogger.com (go ahead, I'll wait right here until you catch up). If you already have an account using one of google's other services, you can sign in with that information; if not, click on create a blog and fill in the required information to establish your account on the following page. You may need to verify your identity; google will either text or place an automated voice call with a code that you will need to enter on the signup page (if you choose the phone call over text, make sure to have a pen and paper handy to write it down before answering).

After verification, you'll enter the name of your blog in the appropriate spot as well as what you want the URL to include. If the URL you want isn't available on blogspot, pick something that's similar to your blog name, and easy to remember. The name of the blog and the URL can be different; the URL is what someone will type in to get to your blog, while the name is what appears in text at the top of your blog. More than one person can have the same blog name, but the URL addresses cannot be identical.

Note: Many people choose to make a 'dummy' blog to practice on, play with templates and layouts, etc. If you'd be more comfortable doing that, pick a name and URL for your practice blog that isn't something that you'll likely want to use for one of your 'real' blogs.

Click on any template on the next page; it doesn't matter which you pick at this point as you can choose a different one at any time.

Presto! You've just created a blog and should be looking at the page where you can enter your first post. (I told you blogspot was easy to use).

Before making your first blog entry, click on the tab that says view blog, so that you can see how everything is arranged at the onset. From there, click on design in the upper right hand corner, which is where you can edit the information in the default gadgets, add more gadgets, and change the overall look of your blog. Click on one of the areas that says add a gadget and play with a few of the over 1,500 goodies you can add to make your blog pretty, useful, or downright silly.

If you want to change the template, background, font, etc, click template designer. Go ahead and make as many changes as you want; you'll be able to see right on that page how your blog will look when you choose the different options. When done, click on the orange box that says apply to blog to save the changes, then either go back to blogger (which will bring you back to where you can play with gadgets and formatting again), or view blog.

While working on your new creation, you'll notice an icon of a screwdriver and wrench in several places; clicking on those tools allows you to quickly edit or delete that gadget without having to go back to the design page.

You can change formatting and layout of your blog whenever the mood strikes you, so go ahead and have some fun with it. For now, click on new post, pick a title, then toss a few words out there to let the world know the latest blogger has arrived.

Once you've got your blog started, read here to learn how to promote it using a blogroll or link list.

Sources:
Personal experience
blogger.com