Starting a blog for the first time is an amazing, yet intimidating experience. Thinking that people are actually going to read – and even share – something you wrote. It’s unlike any other feeling that can be described. But it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. Starting a blog is hard work, and there are a lot of pitfalls along the way. Especially if it’s your first time.
Go to http://www.blogger.com/home and sign in with your gmail id and password, if you don’t have an account then you can create it for free by click the “sign up” button at the top right corner as shown in the below screenshot. Blogger belongs to Google that’s the reason you would be needing an gmail account for building a website on blogspot.
Once you are done with logging in with your gmail credentials, you will be seeing a screen like the below one. Click on “Continue to Blogger“.
In this step, you would need to provide the title and address of your website. For example: If you want to build a website on books then the Address (It’s also known as Domain name and site’s URL) could be bestbooks.blogspot.com or itbooks.blogspot.com and the title can be Best IT Books Blog. You must know that since these domain names are free, they would be suffixed with blogspot.com by default.
By completing till step 1, you successfully own a website for free. Now, you can start posting posts/articles, click on start blogging!
Give your website’s address in the browser and press enter. You would be presented with a website, which you own!!. Initially, you may not like the look and layout but it will look good after sometime.
Since you have successfully create a website on blogspot, you can now start posting articles on your new website. Refer the below screenshot. Write content, title and hit Publish to publish the post.
You may be wondering what is permalink – It’s a link (Address, which you enter in browser to view your posts) to your post/article. There are two options available when you write a post.
Automatic permalink: Blogger would automatically generate the permalink for the current post, based on the title provided in the title section.
Custom Permalink: Choose custom permalink in sidebar as shown in the below screenshot and provide the value. Lowers cases words with hyphen(-) in between are the best choices.
You may want to change the look of your website, you can easily do so by changing the template of the website. You would be presented with a collection of templates. Choose the one, which you like, click on the apply the template button, provided below each of the template in library.
Go to layout section from sidebar and click on edit in Navbar section. Select the look and style you require and hit save!
You can add Gadgets to the blog’s sidebar, below navigation menu and in footers. Whenever you click on Add a Gadget button in layout section, a popup window would come up where you can browse and add gadgets. Don’t forget to save the settings.
Real time traffic status for your website. It would show you the traffic sources, audiences and many more details. Here, you can find out what all posts/articles/pages are getting most of the traffic and for which keywords. This will help you to boost organic traffic to your website.
Now everything is setup perfectly. You can start blogging and once you start getting decent amount of traffic to your website, you can apply for adsense right away from your blogspot dashboard.