Having huge interest on starting your own blog, then this article is all you need to do it. And the best part is, it's free!
Having a blog online is best for content marketers, writers, freelancers, story writers, or anyone who wants to showcase their thoughts and skills in blogging. Another best part about blogging is that you can earn from it. Awesome, right!
Today, I will teach you how to create a professional looking blog. This will be perfect if you have your own Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram or even without anything, you can easily do this tutorial. Feels exciting? Let's start!
What is a Blog?
It is a website filled with articles written by authors and owners available to be read by their viewers. It also consist of videos, images, banners, and commentaries by people who have read the article.
Benefits of Blogging?
It helps anyone to build an online business. But if you want to have a stable business, you need to put efforts and dedication to make it stronger and stands out from the rest.
How to Create a Free Blog?
First of all, you need three things to start;
1. Gmail account
Since Blogger is own by Google, you must have a gmail account to continue. If you don't have any account yet, just head over to gmail.com and create your own.
2. Logo
With this logo, it will help us make our website more unique and build your brand.
3. Your Undivided Attention
Follow all instructions to avoid mistakes and if ever you have questions, you can comment it on the comment section afterwards.
Setting Up
Step 1. Open a new tab in your browser and go to blogger.com, this is a free blogging platform owned by google that allows you to create a free blog. Go ahead and click the 'Create a Blog' button.
Step 2. Now put your gmail account and click next then put your password and continue.
Step 3. After that, you need to put your blog name (you can always change your name in the setting section) and click next.
Step 4. Put your subdomain for your blog, it can be anything that you want. The subdomain will be a unique link for your blog (i.e. yourblog.blogspot.com) where you can redirect your audience.
Great! We just finished creating our blog, let's now move on to step two.
Changing Your Blog Theme
Step 1. Just click the 3-line icon at the top-left side of your dashboard and click 'View Blog' link to view your blog.
Blogger automatically set a default theme from every blog created. You can always use the default theme if you want, but for this tutorial, we will be using 'Polar Theme' because it's simple and clean theme for our website. Go ahead and click this link to download the theme if you want.
Step 2. Now go back to your dashboard and choose 'Theme'.
Step 3. Click the arrow-down icon below the cuztomize button and a popup will appear where you will upload the file.
Step 4. Next thing to do is to upload the theme you just download by clicking the upload button and select the downloaded file (file should be in an xml format).
After the theme is restored successfully, you can go ahead and view your blog to check the result.
Creating Your Post
Step 1. To add a new post, just click the plus icon at the bottom right side of your dashboard.
Step 2. From there, you can now start creating your own post. In my case I have written some content and add the title as an example. You can also add images and videos from the post.
Step 3. After finishing your content, don't forget to add the featured image. For that, just click on the place where you want to add the image and click the the image icon then hit the 'Ulpaod from computer' button.
Step 4. Next is to select the image you want to add and then click the 'Select' button to confirm then the images will be automatically added to your post.
Step 5. If you're satisfied with your created content, you can publish it by clicking the publish icon.
Now when you go back to your blog and hit the refresh button, you will see your publish article with the featured image we just added as you can see on the image below.
If ever you want to change the image, you can always replace them by editing your post.
Editing Your Navigation Menu
If you go now to the blog and click the menu icon, you will see default navigation links. This are navigation links added by the author of the 'Polar Theme'. It's easy to change those links by following the steps.
Step 1. Going to your dashboard, dive in to the layout section.
Step 2. After that, click the 3 dot icon at the top right side of your browser and select the desktop site option. This will help us widen the browser viewing option to see all the widgets.
Step 3. Go ahead and hover over the main menu widget and click the edit icon to edit the navigation links.
Step 4. Now you will see the default navigation links, you can either edit or delete all of them and add your own links.
Let me add a navigation link to show you how it works. Just click the 'Add new item' and then put the link and the name of that link. See the sample image below.
Step 5. After entering needed item, click on save to confirm your action.
Step 6. Now save all the changes to configure any customizations and go back to your blog and refresh the page. After that, if we go ahead and click on the navigation menu, you'll see the added navigation menu that we just created.
Add Your Own Logo
Every website have its own logo commonly for branding. You can also add any logo design you want and create brand for your blog.
Important Notice: Some of you might have an error in uploading the logo from your files. In respond to that, you need to upload your logo somewhere else and get the link of that uploaded logo.
Step 1. To do that, go and create a new page by clicking the 'Page' tab in your dashboard
Step 2. Now click the plus icon to add a new page where we will be uploading the logo
Step 3. It's time to upload the logo you want for your blog. Just click the upload image icon and select the logo that you want from your files and other options.
Step 4. After uploading your logo, go to 'HTML' view
and highlight only the link inside the 'href' tag and then copy it.
Step 3. Last thing to do is to go again to your 'Layout' tab and click the edit icon on the 'Header Logo' section to upload the logo link.
Scroll down and select 'Input link' and paste the logo link that we copied from the page and click save.
Now go to your blog and see if your logo appears. You're all done!
I think this is the best way to start a new blog to showcase your skills and talents and also make money from it.
To Wrap Up
There you have it guys! I hope you got helpful information within this post. Let's sum up what we've done so far. In this blog we have discuss how to setup our blog, changing our theme to a more simple and beautiful styles, creating our first post, editing our navigation menu and we have set our own bloh logo.
Don't forget to share this post to your friends so you can help them too. And if you have any question related to this article, comment it down on the comment section below. Thank you!