5 Steps to Easy Blogging

I thought I’d share how we blog, because I’ve had a couple of people ask me, and because I really like the way it’s all set up through Google.

1. Create Your Blog

We’ve created our blog using Blogger.com because it’s the easiest to use and offers the most flexibility without buying custom webspace and hosting your own blog.  Here’s a video that shows you how to setup a Blogger blog:

 

2. Register Your Custom Domain (Optional)

By default, your blog url will be yourblogname.blogspot.com.  Everything else we do is free, but we do pay $10 a year to have the address instead be www.yourblogname.com.

The easiest way to set this up is to create it through the Blogger interface.  When you do this, you can also access custom versions of Google’s applications like Gmail and Calendar.  For example, I could create luke@stephanieandluke.com as an email address for myself.  The interface would look like Gmail.

 

3. Track Visitors To Your Site

If you’re going to go to the trouble of posting pictures and text on your blog, it’s nice to know how many folks are going to look at it.  We use Google Analytics to track this.  It gives you all sorts of information on number of visitors and where they come from, etc.  For stephanieandluke.com, we get about 40 visitors a day, mostly from Texas and Virginia.  Here’s a video that shows you how to set up Google Analytics on your blog:

 

4. Allow People To Subscribe To Your Site

I finally got around to setting this up for our site in the last post.  Using Feedburner allows people to receive email updates from your site.  If they’re more internet savvy, they may use a feed reader that aggregates a lot of different websites into a custom digest.  Regardless, you can allow subscription using the instructions here. (sorry, no video)

 

5. Post To Your Blog More Easily Using Windows Live Writer

The only real problem I have with Blogger is that they have the most terrible online posting interface ever.  Fortunately, if you’re own windows, this problem is easily solved using a free program called Windows Live Writer that you can download.

It provides a Microsoft Word style interface for writing posts and publishing them and allows you to easily insert videos, etc.

You can download Windows Live Writer here. (In the installer, make sure to only select the Writer component of Windows Live, don’t install all the other components.)