Blogger.com, is a blogging platform that is owned and operated by Google. It’s a great platform for someone who wants to blog casually for fun and also want’s a platform that is totally free.
The blogger platform grew in popularity back in the 2000’s because it allowed users to create and manage their own blogs easily (and for free), offering customizable templates, straight forward publishing tools, and the ability to share multi-media like text, images, and videos.
Blogger was originally launched in 1999 by Pyra Labs, it was later acquired by Google in 2003.
Blogger today:
To get started with Blogger you’ll need a free Gmail account, then navigate over to Blogger.com and log in with your Gmail account.
You should be looking at your blogger dashboard:
Posts – Write and publish blog posts.
Stats – How many people visited your site. Tends to count bots so it’s not particularly accurate.
Comments – If people (or bots) comment on your posts they will be found here.
Earnings – Once your blogger blog has aged and has content you’ll be able to run Google AdSense.
Layout – Change the layout of your theme, add blocks and content.
Theme – Change the theme of your blog, the them controls the look and feel of your site.
Settings – Advanced settings for your blog. Here is where you can set a custom domain name, make your site private, enable HTTPS, set custom redirects and more.
Reading list – Blogger blogs you follow, any latest content they publish will be found here.
How to create your first blog post
To begin writing your first blog post click on the big “new post” button
You’ll be in your blog post dashboard. From here you can set a title, then you’ll want to write content to publish.
Your title is the major heading, each heading you add in should be tagged as heading or subheading. You do that by clicking where it says “normal” in your dashboard.
A dropdown will appear and set any heading and subheading as appropriate.
From this dashboard you can also upload images, embed videos, make bullet points, change the text color and change the text alignment.
Meta data
In the righthand side bar is where you set the blog posts meta data. This data is what will appear when your blog post is indexed by Google and other search engines.
“Labels” are your post category. Permalink is where you can change the URL.
“Search description” is what will appear in Google under the title.
Is Blogger free?
Yes, Blogger is really free. There are no pricing plans to upgrade to.
That means you get fast hosting, can publish content, upload photos and videos in your blog posts for free with no stated limitations and set a custom domain (the domain you’ll need to pay for).
To sign up to blogger you’ll need a Gmail account and your blogger blog will be initially be located at a subdomain of blogspot.com. What’s great about Blogger is that you can set a custom domain name for your blogger blog at not additional cost like WordPress.com.
Yes, you’ll have to pay for the domain name from a domain name registrar, but unlike WordPress.com that forces you to upgrade to the “personal” plan to set a custom domain, blogger simply enables this feature with all accounts.
Namecheap
Low prices on domain names, low renewal rates, free WHOIS protection and good support.
I use Namecheap for all my domains and use them in my tutorial videos.
Choose your template
Blogger works by way of you choosing a template, creating static pages for things like your about page or contact page and to then publishing blog posts.
Blogger is specifically designed for blogging and nothing more. You get a basic text editor, can set headers and sub headers within your content, embed videos and images as well as edit the meta data of all your content.
Blogger monetization options
Blogger has AdSense integration built in which is the most popular ad network for bloggers. You can also do affiliate marketing for something like Amazon Associates and you can promote your own products and courses in your blog posts.
Overall, for a free platform blogger enables their users to make an income from their online work fairly easily. What I particularly like is that you can enable AdSense auto ads to maximize your display ad results.
Where blogger.com falls short however is the lack of affiliate link cloaking. What that means is that you can’t change an long and weird looking affiliate link into something more logical trustworthy looking, like example.com/product.
Blogger blogs also struggle to rank and obtain organic search traffic when compared to other CMS options like WordPress on a shared web host. It’s possible to rank, just more difficult
What is blogger.com?
In short, Blogger.com stands out as a user friendly, free platform that’s been enabling people to share their thoughts online since 1999. With Google’s acquisition, it offers a simple way to create, customize, and publish content.
I do suggest using a custom domain for your Blogger.com instead of the default subdomain (example.blogspot.com).
Namecheap
Low prices on domain names, low renewal rates, free WHOIS protection and good support.
I use Namecheap for all my domains and use them in my tutorial videos.