In this tutorial, we will cover using an external hosting option for your blog, which is the simplest and easiest way to start your blogging journey.  This is a follow-on article from ‘How to Start Blogging‘ which you can read for background information and also if you want to set up your own hosting option for blogging.  Let’s go through the steps next with a typical external hosting option.

You have various options for this, but for the purpose of this article we will be using the Blogger Website.  So first go to the website here:

http://www.blogger.com/

This is what you should see.

Go ahead now and go through the steps to Create a new Account.  First, click on the orange arrow which says ‘CREATE YOUR BLOG NOW’.  You will need to enter your own email address, so the blogger site can send you an activation email, a password of your choice, the Display name people will see.  Enter the verification words, accept the terms & conditions then click on ‘CONTINUE’.

The next screen is where you will enter the name of your blog.  We will assume you’ve thought about this a lot, and you’re obviously dying to get started to writing your own blog, but the choice of name is very important and we will come back to this later.  As you can see from the screen below, I first selected the words ‘mykitchengarden’ as the name for my blog, but it had already been taken.  It shows you alternatives you can choose, and I selected ‘mykitchengardenblog’.

Having selected the name, you now have a unique address (URL) on the internet where your blog will be hosted at blogger.com, and in my case my URL is

http://mykitchengardenblog.blogspot.com/

It maybe worth noting your own URL down, so you can always type it into your browser to check what you have created.  In the next step, we select one of several templates you can choose from which will govern the appearance and the look and feel of your blog.  Click on the preview options to see what they look like and then select one for now.  As you can see, I’ve selected the ‘minima-black’ template for my blog.

Click on ‘CONTINUE’ when you have made your selection.  The next screen shows you’ve finished this part of the exercise.  Thats it, you have created your own blog.

Ok, we know your blog is empty and you have n’t written anything yet, and if you opened another browser window and typed in your URL for your blog, you will see this empty blog.  Mine looked like this!!

If you next click on the “START BLOGGING” button in blogger.com, you can start entering some content to populate your blog. As you can see below, I’ve done this.  Enter a title for your first blog post, mine is n’t very original, but you get the idea.  Your title should be catchy enough to get readers to want to come and view your posts, so make them interesting and punchy.  The next step is to enter the actual text for your post, you can see what I have written.  You can use all the editing options, even add images or videos, but all that is getting into the details of using blogger.com which I can cover in a separate tutorial if there is enough demand.

When you’ve entered the text, just click on the orange ‘PUBLISH POST’ button and then go ahead and view your blog.  The screenshot below shows my blog now with this first post present.

You can see all the main information such as Date, Posted By, Comments, Archives, Profiles and a whole lot of other things are done for you with this externally hosted option, and this will be enough for the majority of people who just want a presence on the internet for their main hobbies or interests.  For the others, well, we need to start looking at how to do it yourself, a bit more painful, but in the end you will have a tailored solution for your own needs, and it will be your own website.  So read on, to the next tutorial on blogging which I will be writing soon.

Any comments, ideas or suggestions for improving this post, please let me know.  Also, if you’d like to know more about how to progress from this first step with blogger.com, and get into the details of editing, adding images/videos and changing the look and feel of your blog, please leave a comment requesting this, or hit the CONTACT button at the top and leave a message.

Hope that’s been helpful to some people.  Good Luck, and happy blogging if that’s all you wanted to know.  For the rest, join me in my next tutorial.

Daniel Hunt

Postscript:

For those of you who like to watch videos and see all those steps again, here’s a screencast on how to become a blogger on blogger.com, with the usual advert from the maker of the video…

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