"How do I get started with blogger"

One of the most common questions I hear from people pretty new on the internet in general, that is friends have even asked me, so with that in mind I decided to set this very basic step by step guide blog up, to share tips and such to help you or anyone who is interested in creating a blog.

Importantly I have set it up using the very tools I write about, showing you how it's done in plain English while also...

Doing as I say.

If you have never created a blog or website before, why choose blogger and blogspot?

Good question, as a long term user of blogger, still using both blogspot blog (bloggers own free hosted subdomain hosting, like this very blog at the time of writing) and having hosted blogger based blogs on my own domains I think experience tells me far more than some of the "experts" (most self proclaimed), would say to you...even I have read some of their "tips and whatnot" and shook my head in disgust at the misinformation and misleading "tips" shared as though from experience.

Merely opinion most of the time.

The so called experts say you must have your own domain...while true it's often better as you then OWN that blog, it doesn't mean you should always use them, abandoning the blogspot set up is just silly in my view.

Even if you decide to go for it with a new domain...

Getting the domain and setting that up is not so straightforward as these experts would have you believe...many have never done it themselves and pay someone else to do all this "dirty work", makes sense for these "employees" to find it easy...it's what they do!

That doesn't help you when it comes to sorting your own out but right now it's not even needed, blogspot is fine for the new blog creator.

Now I am not saying I am an expert, but I do know what you need to know and that is the reason this blog was started, to help you with getting your own blog set up with ease and set up to work right for you.

There are benefits to using blogspot such as it being free, simple and in some cases the only way of getting things up in order to find out which blogs (if you do a few) you should get a domain for without wasting money.

The dashboard itself allows you to control several blogs in one place, unlike some other platforms where each blog gets it's own dashboard.

So, before anything else just go set a blog up already... or set up a gmail account then go to blogger.

This is the page where you create your new blog, if you unsure yet of what your blog will be about just set up a dummy blog, naming it anything as it's just to learn the process with. Don't worry about it at this stage just getting familiar with how it works is the main thing.

On the next page you will be asked to choose a template, leave it with the default which will be the same as this blog you are reading.

The reason is simply that this is the most basic and straightforward template to learn with while it will also make sense when reading this blog here (at the time of writing), although this blogs look could change sometime I will keep it on this basic one for as long as possible for your benefit.

Then you will be asked to create a post, my advice would be to simply do a test post, then write a few words and publish, not to worry about it as any post is editable and deletable.

This means you will get to see your actual blog as it looks live.

Now you should have a blog with your first small post showing, along with the basic added content by way of "widgets" that show on the right column. RSS, followers and archives.

The widgets and such are all added and deleted or just moved around on the "layout" part, as seen by a link on the blogger dashboard.