You are here
to finally get step-by-step instructions on how to start a blog. I will try to
make this as painless and easy as possible; however, if there is anything
confusing, please comment below so I can make adjustments to these
instructions.
Your first
step in getting a blog is determining if you want to own your own domain
(incurring a monthly fee) or use a free blogging site. After reading How to Make Money with a Blog, I highly recommend using the free sites to get
your feet wet. Here are a few links to get you started:
- Wordpress
- Blogger
- Tumblr
- LiveJournal
- These are a few places I have heard of; however, I have only used Blogger.com. According to the article Best Free Blog Hosting Sites it appears that there is a Google Page Rank (PR) that should be 8+ for the site to get traffic.
Once you
decide on a site, you will need to sign up for the service. I will walk you
through setting up a basic blog through Blogger. I believe most
of the sites have instructions, but this will hopefully help you understand the
basics here.
In order to
start a blog at Blogger, you will need a Gmail
account. If you already have an account, simply sign in through the blue box on
the right and skip the next step. If you do not have an account, click on the
red “SIGN UP” box or click here to sign up.
Insert all
required information, choose a Gmail account name and password (don’t forget to
make a note of this somewhere so you can access your account). You will have to
prove you are not a robot and remember to click on the box to agree to Google’s
Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. When you are finished with inputting all
necessary information, click “Next”.
Follow all
onscreen instructions to set up your account. Once you have accessed Blogger,
you will need to start a blog. You will click on the button for a “New Blog”.
You will receive a page that says: “Blogs List > Create a new blog” and
requests a Title, an Address, and a Template. Please note in the Address box,
you will automatically have “.blogspot.com” added to your address. This will be
the location of your blog on the web. Please note that there are a limited
number of basic Templates, and although they allow some customization later,
you will probably want to find another host or obtain your own domain in the
future if you enjoy blogging and want to do more with your blog. This will
truly be a basic blog, just like this blog is.
Once you get
into your new blog, you will be given the opportunity to write a new blog, to
customize the blog and a few other options. Here I will cover how to post to
your blog. Unless you know .html code, I recommend that you click on “Compose”
on the left. This will give you the opportunity to make a few minor changes to
the font and size. I personally prefer to use a word processing program to
write so that I can copy and paste the formatting with the text. This affords
me a few extra options in the formatting department, although I still have not
ventured out too much in the area of formatting.
I’m going to
walk you through your first blog post. You can type what I say or whatever you
would like if you know what you want to write about. Here are the basic steps
of posting in Blogger.
- Note beside the orange “Post” there is a box with a grayed out “Post title”. Click in the box and type: “My First Post”
- We will not change any of the formatting for this first post. Click in the big white box at the bottom and type:
- This is my first post to my own blog. I am so happy to finally be able to post to my own blog. This is exciting, and I certainly hope you will visit often. Have a blessed day!
- Click “Save” and then “Preview” if you want to make sure you are happy with the look of your post. Make any changes you’d like to make, Save and Preview as often as you need to. When you are happy with the way your blog post appears in the preview, simply click on “Publish” and your blog is now live!
If you want to link to another post,
you will need to open another tab in your browser (or another browser if you do
not have tabbed browsing) and find the site you want to link to. You can link
to my blog by following these steps:
- Right click on this link to BeginnerBlogging 101. Choose “Open Link in New Tab” (or “Open Link in New Window” if you do not have tabbed browsing).
- Go to the new link that just opened. Highlight the site name and copy the site address.
- Go back to your blog post and click on the blue Link button in the formatting bar.
- This will pull up a box that says “Edit Link”. Click in the box after “Text to display:” and type: “Beginner Blogging 101”.
- Under “Link to:”, click in the box, right click and paste the site address to my blog.
- Click OK and you will see the link as: Beginner Blogging 101
- If you need to insert an email address, use the same process, but type the person’s name in the Text to display box and click on Email address before typing the address in the URL box.
I hope this
has been helpful to get you started. As I stated above, please comment if you
have any questions or suggestions to make these instructions more clear. Thanks
for reading and I hope you’ll visit often.
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