How to Make Blog using Blogger the Correctly
How to make blog on blogger the right way - Creating a blog using Blogger is very easy and all you need is an active Gmail account. That is what people said and there is a truth in the sentence. Yes, it is easy if you just want to do basic blogging like create a blog to write your stories, but if you have higher purposes that you want to achieve through blogging like introducing and promoting your platform or brand, making your ideas reachable to people in every corner of the world, keeping your visitors returning to your blog, and avoiding your blog from stopping in the middle of your blogging journey, only having an active Gmail account is not enough.
There is a huge difference between basic blogging like taking an empty book to write your story and building a company that people and you can take benefits from. Creating a blog should be seen as building a company. A basic blogging tips that we can say, well-structured plan execution is required.
This article is written to show you a blogging preparation that you must follow if you are about to blogging seriously. The content of this article, whatever the length and depth are, can be "too much" for people who just want to share their stories via blogging. Nevertheless, for a serious blogger, this article must be "not enough" for this is just an introduction to blogging with Blogger. We will be elaborating the items in the blogging preparation in the other posts, hopefully.
How to prepare your blog on blogger the right way
There are several basic blogging steps that you must go through to start your blog and those exclude the first article from the list. Well, since a blog is a vessel for your articles, what you need to do first is to prepare the vessel. When the vessel is ready and needs no further significant changes, you can pour your ideas into it. However, in the process, you will need a dummy article to see how your blog looks like. Now, let’s dive.
Phase One: Initial Preparation
There are two steps you need to take into action carefully in this phase. The first one is making your Gmail account and the second one is to choose a blogger template (from a dozen).
Must Read: Four Basic Exercises to Improve Writing Skill
Making your Gmail Account
We are not trying to tell you how to create a Gmail account for you may know it already; even you might have had one. We are telling you some crucial ideas to consider in making your Gmail account for blogging purposes.
It is highly recommended that you use a certain Gmail account you make for blogging purposes only. If you already have a Gmail account that you use for work, please don't use the same account for blogging. Using a new Gmail account you make only for blogging will make it easy for you to manage the information (emails) and consequently your blogging management becomes easier.
Choose a good name for your email. You want your email address to look professional and to do that you need to name your email address with something closely relevant to your blog niche. If you plan to have more than one blogs since Blogger allows you to have them just with a single Gmail account, please choose a more general name for your account.
Assume that your name is John, name your Gmail address like john.inc, john_institute, john.lab, or a name that represents your niche like brilliant_ideas, food.researcher, outdoor_guy, and so on. Of course, this is not predictable for you don't know if those names have been taken by other people. Please don't name your email like badboy, killing_machine, dirty.shoes, or anything alike.
Choosing a Blogger Template
Blogger has provided several free blogger templates for your blog but you may want your blog to look different. There are plenty of free Blogger templates on the internet and you can take some of them that you think suits your niche. Here are some considerations in choosing a Blogger template.
Many bloggers want to have an eye-catching blog and that is good. However, having a nice-looking blog is not enough and sometimes can be irrelevant to your blog content. Blogger templates are designed to match the blog contents. What you need to do is to find out some blogger templates that match your niche and take only one of them.
If your blog is about culinary, you can try this searching keyword "free Blogger template for food blog"; you can change the word food to any word that matches your niche. You will have a dozen templates ranging from the most complex one to the simplest one. They are all cool templates but you must choose only one of them and make sure that you will not change it later unless the template has some problems. Here are the things you want to make sure the template you choose has.
Easy navigation: a good blogger template should not be complicated with too many confusing menus on the screen. One menu bar on the top, a sidebar either in the right or the left, and a footer with some links are enough. The simplicity of the template will promise easy navigation that will make your visitors love your blog. People visit your blog to find information, not to appreciate your blog appearance. If they don't find what you say you have (because they can't navigate your blog easily), they will leave your blog and never return. Don’t worry about the social media icons or anything else for they can be added in your sidebar later.
Fast loading: a good template loads fast. This is related to the complexity of the template. The more features it has, the slower it loads. What makes a template load slowly is not only the quality of the internet connection but also how the template is coded. A fast-loading template is usually a simple template because it does not need too many scripts to execute. So, if you find a simple and easy-to-navigate template, the chance is you also find a fast-loading template. Please be advised that an empty blog loads faster than a blog with articles especially if there are images in the articles. We will discuss how to overcome this issue in the other post (remind us if we forget!).
Responsive: most of your visitors will be using smartphones or tablets so you need to make sure that they can navigate your blog easily without a notebook. You can check the description of the template to find out whether the template promises a responsive display to different screen sizes. If it does not, discard the template. One of the responsive templates for blogger is Jannify Fast-Loading Blogger Template.
SEO optimized: you want people to find your blog easily on the internet and for that purpose, you need an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) optimized blogger template. You can also check if the template provider describes the template as SEO Optimized. If you are not sure whether it is optimized for a search engine or not, don't worry for we will address the topic in the other posts.
You will need to try some templates sometimes to find the best template that suits your niche and expectation. Therefore, you need a dummy article so that you can see how your blog will look like. Post the dummy article first before installing the template. If the template does not fulfill your expectation and requirement, install the other ones. However, I must tell you that you will never be satisfied completely with any template you have installed. You need to know when to stop changing templates and decide on one template to be used.
Phase Two: Basic Settings
Your template has been installed but this is not the time to post your article. If you have an article to be posted, you may need to postpone it before all the basic settings are done. There are several basic settings that you need to do.
Clearing the unused menus: the template you just have installed must have some links set by default like social media icons and navigation menus either in the top navigation bar, in the sidebar, or the footer. You need to clear them by removing them from the layout or just hide them if you want to use them later. Some important links you need to keep or put on the top navigation bar are home, about, and contact. These are common menus that every blog needs to have. If you provide certain services or products, you need to put them too. The link content can be left empty or replaced by "/" or "#" signs for the content that is not ready yet.
Un-Setting the custom robots.txt: in the blogger setting tab, you can find Enable Custom Robots.txt. Robots.txt is a configuration file that decides whether your blog can be crawled, indexed, and followed by search engine crawlers like Googlebot or Bingbot or Yandex. You can also set the robots.txt to block certain pages or articles from being crawled. You are highly recommended to disable this custom robots.txt if you don’t know what you must do with this. So, in this phase, just don’t change anything by disabling the custom robots.txt. The default robots.txt works well. If you want to use custom robots.txt, you should refer to the post Custom Robots.txt for Blogger SEO. Or, if you want to use a more SEO friendly robots.txt, you can use our SEO Robots.txt Generator for Blogger.
Setting Meta Tags: to improve your blog SEO, you need to set important meta tags. There is a setting in the Blogger that you can use to set it manually but we don't recommend it if you are a fresh blogger. You can use one of the Free Meta Tag Generators on the internet. The meta tags that you need to set in this phase cover the description and keywords that represent your blog. There are some other meta tags that you can set if they are provided by the meta tag generator you are using. Read the instruction carefully before you decide to use any option they provide. You will get some HTML codes that you need to put on your blog main HTML file (your template file installed on blogger). Copy the HTML codes and save them in your local drive first. Then, copy the codes and paste them on your HTML file right after the <head> tag. Please do not change the <title> tag although it is provided by the meta tag generator because your template has it by default. So, paste everything except the <title> tag.
Adding important widgets to the sidebar: your sidebar should contains these common widgets: visitor counters and subscribe form or follow us button. You can add widgets as many as you want but these widgets are important and need to set first. Another widget that you may want to add is a Live Chatbox but you need to put the code you get from a free live chat box generator right in the main HTML file of your blog just like you did with the meta-tags above. Remind us to show you how if you still don’t find it in this blog. Additionally, you must save the codes to your local drive, in case you need to change your template in the future.
Setting your Tracking ID: you want to track the progress and statistics of your blog from time to time. To do that, by using your Gmail account for blogging, sign up to Google Analytics. After signing up, create your property and register your blog to Google Analytics. You will get a tracking ID. You need to put the tracking ID to your blog by navigating the blogger setting and find the Tracking ID. Please read the post about Google Tracking ID for Blogger.
Now, you are ready for the next phase.
Phase Three: Submitting your Sitemap
Don’t wait for this. Many bloggers submitted their sitemaps when they some articles in their blog. We recommend you to submit your sitemap before your first article so that the search engine can crawl and index your articles regularly which is faster than asking the search engine to crawl and index all of your articles at once (that is not how search engines work by the way).
Submitting your sitemap means introducing your blog to the search engines. Two giant search engines today are Google and Bing. So, first, you need to use your blogging Gmail account to sign up to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster. You will need to create a property in these two search engines just like you did with Google Analytics. It takes no more than five minutes to do that. After that, you can submit your blog sitemap.
Blogger has at least three sitemaps: atom.xml, sitemap.xml, and rss.xml. You can submit all of them to the Google Search Console and Bing but one of them is enough. Based on experience, we found that rss.xml is good because it updates your blog information regularly as you post new content. To submit your sitemap, find the Submit Sitemap button in each search console. Your blogger sitemap address is this:
https://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
https://yourblog.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml
https://yourblog.blogspot.com/sitemap-pages.xml
https://yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Please be advised that submitting the sitemap is done by entering the URL and not by uploading the sitemap file. After submitting your sitemap, you can return to your blog and start posting your article. However, don't be hurry. You are not the only blogger posting new articles. Post new content regularly (once or twice a week is very good) so that the search engines can crawl and index your content regularly too.
That's all you need to do to prepare your blog. After having all of these done the right way, you can start posting new content regularly. Blogging is a journey, not a race. Quality content is more valuable than scrap content. Write your blog for people who need to read it, not for Google Adsense. If you do it right, your blog will grow as well as your visitors. If you want your article get indexed by Google easily and fast, please read the post How to have Google index your site.
If you have made your blog by following the steps in the three phases we presented to you, please put your blog URL in the comment section so that we can visit your blog for you have visited ours.
Please, only relevant comments are accepted. Comments that are irrelevant and/or containing active links will be deleted. Thank you.
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