How To Start?
I would strongly suggest you to go for a customized domain for your blogger blog. It gives professional look and feel to the visitor. Once you have chosen the niche of your blog, it's time to look for a good domain name.Choosing a good domain name is not an easy task and requires some brainstorming. Configuring and integrating your own domain with blogger blog is not difficult at all. Add the following host record in your domain hosting control panel.
HOSTNAME IP ADDRESS/URL RECORD TYPE
www ghs.google.com. CNAME (alias)
@ http://www.yourdomain.com/ URL Redirect
Once you have added these records, go to your blogger dashboard and click Settings tab, then go to Publishing subtab. Click the Custom Domain link and follow the simple procedure to add your domain URL and click ok. Once it is done, it may take from 1 to 3 days before the DNS records of your domain are cached all over the world in domain name servers. You can also see blogger help of configuring custom domain with blogger.
Choose a good theme
The next step is to choose a good theme for your blog. There are hundreds of blogger templates to choose from, and depending on the niche of your blog, you may choose a specific type of template. Do not go for bright, multicolored and fancy themes.Tweaking the theme
Almost every template needs some customization as per bloggers requirements. Designing a good landing page from your chosen template is not difficult at all. All it requires is a bit of CSS editing and some add-on widgets. With simple CSS tricks you can make your blog posts more spicy and attractive.Initial setup
Once your theme is tweaked as per your needs, start building the core pages of your blog. Do not straight away start posting. First create Archives, Contact and About pages with old timestamps, and place a link for each page in navigation menu. It is always advisable to make these important pages beforehand, because any new post on blogger always comes in recent posts. If you will try to make them later, they will appear in recent posts. You can use Disqus commenting system for your blog, as it supports multi-threaded conversations, video comments and standard track backs. A Wordpress style contact form is must for Contact page. Blogger currently has no option to create such form, but you can use Kontactr, to create a customized contact form. Install at least two web analytics script in your blog template, because in case one of the services fails still you can get the traffic data from the other one. Of course Google Analytics should be one of them, the other one can be Sitemeter or Woopra. Both are excellent web analytic services and I use all three of them for my blog. Do not forget to put a search box in the navigation bar. Here is the code.Building on foundation
Once initial setup is complete, you can start posting on your blog. The first 25-30 posts on your blog matters the most. Make good long posts and put the cream in these posts. Populate the Popular Posts section with selective hand picked posts.Monetization strategy
After all the hard work, its time to monetize your blog. There are many approaches to that, and you have to choose the best one for your blog. I would strongly suggest leaving home page free from ads. If your new blog's home page is stuffed with ads, it may annoy the visitor and you may loose your valuable subscriber. Some 125x125 ads in the sidebar are fine, but avoid ads between posts on home page of your blog. Only when the visitor clicks the individual post, ads should be placed in the body of post.
Posting structure and frequency
Every blogger has it's own approach in building a post, still there are some common traits in every good blog post. Often novice bloggers take some time to come up with a definite pattern and structure for their posts. Whatever your approach is, stick to your style for uniformity in your blog posts. If you have time constraints, I would suggest you to publish at least two good long posts per week.
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