How to Do a Blog
A blog has been defined as "an abbreviated word for web-log, a web-based journal in which people can publish their thoughts and opinions on the internet". Having this background information, it is gratifying to know that we now appreciate the importance of blog as an online publishing platform for getting our views, opinions, interests, convictions and, of course businesses across to the knowledge of a worldwide readership community of immensely huge population.
Having said this, let us proceed with a discourse on how to do a blog. Anybody who wants to blog must decide either to use a paid or a free blog. For the purpose of this discussion, we are going to illustrate our teaching on how to do a blog with a free blog platform.
Two blog hosts are very outstanding for providing free blog services to interested individuals and organizations. They are Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. Again, for this illustration, we are using Blogger.com.
Blogger.com is a free blog hosting platform owned by Google. It was about the first of its kind, providing free services for people who wanted to have an online presence in the hay days of blogging at no cost whatsoever. Till date, Blogger has continued to provide this invaluable service for free to all new, fledgling and even mature bloggers (that is people who do blogging), all over the world.
Therefore, if you want to start a free blog with Blogger, all you need to do is open your web browser and type in blogger.com, not forgetting the usual prefix, www. Then, sign up for a blog account. I need to inform you here that one of the requirements for setting up a blog account with Blogger is to have a Gmail account. Gmail, as you probably know, is also owned by Google and it is absolutely free to set up for your use in creating your blog account and for other Google-based accounts like Google Adsense as well as your general e-mail services.
When you have completed the sign-p process for your gmail account, you will see an orange-coloured tab, top right of the Blogger home page with the inscription "Create Account". Click on it and you will be shown a sign-in page where you will enter your newly created e-mail address and the password.
A successful log-in will bring you to the Blogger dashboard to commence blogging. Here, you will have to search for a suitable domain name that meets your need. In choosing a domain name, it is important to bear in mind the purpose of setting up the blog in the first place. It may be for your small business, in which case you will have to craft the domain name after your business name. If it is a niche blog, you will need to carry out a keyword research to determine a profitable niche area around which you can craft your domain name. You will get to know more about keyword research as you read more of the prescribed resource materials on blogging.
The same process goes for whether the blog you want to have is for personal use and you want to secure a domain name after your personal name or any other reason for which you want a blog. In any case, check for availability and select the one you like most. The only caveat here, however, is that your domain name in a free blog will always bear the name of the host as its domain extension. For example, you will have yourdomain.blogspot.com instead of yourdomain.com or .net, etc. in the case of paid blogs. This does not detract from the quality of the blog nor make free blogs any less acceptable both in performance and page rankings in search engines.
The next step will be to give your blog a name and a description, as may be applicable. Thereafter, choose a theme from among the various free blog themes in your blog's dashboard. When you have selected a theme, your new blog site will then have a form and a shape, and will automatically be up and running on the internet. At this stage, you can now congratulate yourself for having a blog entirely set up all by yourself.
From here you can then start blogging by adding contents to your site. You can also upload images to your blog. There is also a provision for you to add html codes in your sidebar or even in the text page, as you may wish, in order to display your Google Adsense or your affiliate links, banners, widgets, etc. You will get to know about html also, in due course.
It is important to point out however that many people would prefer to have a paid blog rather than a free blog. This is where they have the liberty to get a domain extension that looks professional and businesslike. Another reason they would prefer paid blogs is that they can assert full ownership and be in total control of their blogs, and not to be subjected to certain regulations or some sort of dos and don'ts that are common with free blogs. Thirdly, they have thousands of variety of both free and premium blog themes to choose from that will give their blogs the uniqueness they deserve.
Having said this, let us proceed with a discourse on how to do a blog. Anybody who wants to blog must decide either to use a paid or a free blog. For the purpose of this discussion, we are going to illustrate our teaching on how to do a blog with a free blog platform.
Two blog hosts are very outstanding for providing free blog services to interested individuals and organizations. They are Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. Again, for this illustration, we are using Blogger.com.
Blogger.com is a free blog hosting platform owned by Google. It was about the first of its kind, providing free services for people who wanted to have an online presence in the hay days of blogging at no cost whatsoever. Till date, Blogger has continued to provide this invaluable service for free to all new, fledgling and even mature bloggers (that is people who do blogging), all over the world.
Therefore, if you want to start a free blog with Blogger, all you need to do is open your web browser and type in blogger.com, not forgetting the usual prefix, www. Then, sign up for a blog account. I need to inform you here that one of the requirements for setting up a blog account with Blogger is to have a Gmail account. Gmail, as you probably know, is also owned by Google and it is absolutely free to set up for your use in creating your blog account and for other Google-based accounts like Google Adsense as well as your general e-mail services.
When you have completed the sign-p process for your gmail account, you will see an orange-coloured tab, top right of the Blogger home page with the inscription "Create Account". Click on it and you will be shown a sign-in page where you will enter your newly created e-mail address and the password.
A successful log-in will bring you to the Blogger dashboard to commence blogging. Here, you will have to search for a suitable domain name that meets your need. In choosing a domain name, it is important to bear in mind the purpose of setting up the blog in the first place. It may be for your small business, in which case you will have to craft the domain name after your business name. If it is a niche blog, you will need to carry out a keyword research to determine a profitable niche area around which you can craft your domain name. You will get to know more about keyword research as you read more of the prescribed resource materials on blogging.
The same process goes for whether the blog you want to have is for personal use and you want to secure a domain name after your personal name or any other reason for which you want a blog. In any case, check for availability and select the one you like most. The only caveat here, however, is that your domain name in a free blog will always bear the name of the host as its domain extension. For example, you will have yourdomain.blogspot.com instead of yourdomain.com or .net, etc. in the case of paid blogs. This does not detract from the quality of the blog nor make free blogs any less acceptable both in performance and page rankings in search engines.
The next step will be to give your blog a name and a description, as may be applicable. Thereafter, choose a theme from among the various free blog themes in your blog's dashboard. When you have selected a theme, your new blog site will then have a form and a shape, and will automatically be up and running on the internet. At this stage, you can now congratulate yourself for having a blog entirely set up all by yourself.
From here you can then start blogging by adding contents to your site. You can also upload images to your blog. There is also a provision for you to add html codes in your sidebar or even in the text page, as you may wish, in order to display your Google Adsense or your affiliate links, banners, widgets, etc. You will get to know about html also, in due course.
It is important to point out however that many people would prefer to have a paid blog rather than a free blog. This is where they have the liberty to get a domain extension that looks professional and businesslike. Another reason they would prefer paid blogs is that they can assert full ownership and be in total control of their blogs, and not to be subjected to certain regulations or some sort of dos and don'ts that are common with free blogs. Thirdly, they have thousands of variety of both free and premium blog themes to choose from that will give their blogs the uniqueness they deserve.
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