In Part 1 How To Create a Blog For Free Using Blogger I discussed the pros and cons of creating a blog in Blogger platform. The post is not about the pros and cons of creating a blog for affiliate marketing. You must have a website for any product you are promoting if you want traffic from search engines, article marketing , and forum promotion for a long time even after you have ceased to promote the site.
As a reminder, I must reiterate that you should create a blog in Blogger as a last resort only when you cannot afford to spend $10 a month for a reliable web hosting package with unlimited domains. In this post I will go over the basics of starting your own blog in Blogger. I will continue with more settings and customization of your Blogger blog in the next post. The steps to create a Blogger blog are:
1. Create a Google Account. If you have a gmail account, you already have a Google account. If you don’t have gmail account, you can sign up for one here.
2. Go to Blogger.com and you will see a screen like the one shown below.
3. Sign into Google Account. Click on the CREATE A BLOG button. If you’re not signed into Google, you will see the Gooogle’s Sign in page
Once you’re signed into Google, you will be redirected to the basic setup page for your blog as shown below
4. Enter Basic Information: On the basic setup page, you need to enter the following information
- Your Blog Title
- Your Blog Address
- And a Captcha verification to confirm
You should carefully chose your Blog title. Preferably you should use a keyword from your niche. For example, if you blog is about Rose Gardening, you can use a title like Secrets Of Healthy Rose Garden. Don’t use your name like Mary’s Blog. On the other hand, if you can use the keyword along with your own name, it’s ok. For example, you can title it as Mary’s Secrets to Healthy Rose Garden. The title should be self-revealing about your blog contents.
Strategies To Find a Unique Blog Address Using Your Niche Keyword: Blog address is the URL of your blog, just like a website URL or address. Your blog will always be a sub-domain of blogger.com. Of course, you can purchase a domain and map the blogger sub-domain to your own domain. I will discuss it in another post. For now, just create a sub-domain. Here also you need to choose your sub-domain carefully. You will find that a sub-domain with the most obvious keywords from your niche are already taken. For example, it will be impossible to find a sub-domain rose-gardening.
You have a few options and you may develop a strategy that can apply to all your Blogger sub-domains whenever you find that the sub-domain is taken. A few strategies I use are:
- 1. Always use a hyphen in between the words in a keyword. For example, rose gardening becomes rose-garden
- 2. Use three to five words keywords, e.g. healthy-rose-garden
- 3. Append a verb to the keyword if it makes sense, e.g. make-rose-garden-healthy
- 4. Append how to to your keyword, e.g. how-to-rose-garden
- 5. Append an adjective to the keyword, e.g. elegant-rose-garden. Here is a list of English adjectives
- 5. Append your first name cleverly, e.g. marys-healthy-rose-garden
- 6. Append a prepositions to the keyword if it makes sense, e.g. beyond-rose-garden, about-rose-garden, with-rose-garden etc. here is list of English preposition.
- 7. Any other tricks you can brainstorms to modify your main keyword to find an available sub-domain. For example, instead of, appending a preposition and adjective sometimes I prepend it to the key word, e.g. rose-garden-healthy, rose-garden-about
Once you find a good available blog URL, enter the Captcha and click CONTINUE. You will be taken to the Blog template page
5. Select Your Blog Template preferably one with a white background. You have limited choice here. However, there are third party free themes that you can use and change your selected theme later. Click CONTINUE button and you will see a page that tells you that you have created a blog successfully. For now, ignore the Advanced Setup Option and Click START BLOGGIN button. You will land on a WYSIWYG editor to create your first blog post.
Use the WYSIWYG editor to create your first blog post. If you have never used a WYSIWYG editor, play with it by highlighting words and paragraphs and then clicking various buttons on the editor to familiarize yourself with WYSIWYG editing.
How To Create Blog Post Without Any Efforts
If you have read my series on Article Marketing, you know how to create a short article or blog post in 15 minutes or less. If you have no clue about what you are going to write about, this is what you should do:
I assume that you already have a list of keywords you will use in your blog post. You don’t have the list, review my article on creating niche keyword list. Establish a goal to write one article every day for at least a month. Go to ezinearticles.com and search for articles using a keyword. Take a few articles and write an article based on those articles. Don’t copy any paragraphs. Use the keyword in your title, the first and the last paragraphs.
Besides creating your Blog Posts every day, you also need to create a few Blog Pages.
Difference Between Blog Posts And Blog Pages
Blog posts are chronologically displayed on the home page of your blog. Blog pages are web pages that generally don’t show up on the home page. You link the blog pages from your menu, blog posts or sidebar links.
Three must have Blog pages are About Page that tells the visitors about the blog author and blog topic. The other two pages are: The TOS (terms of service) and Privacy Pages. You can copy these pages from any site and modify according to your requirements. You can copy from my site. But please modify them accordingly.
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