How to Start a Blog Using Blogger

Since I've had a number of requests for help getting started with blogger, I'm going to do a "step-by-step" with pictures and text for those who have never ever even looked at or know what a blog is.

Before you start a blog, you need to decide what your subject will be - what you are going write about and put in your blog. What it shouldn't be is something you have no clue about: if you aren't doctor or nurse or paramedic, don't write about medical stuff. If you've never earned a penny doing something online, then don't write about earning money online. Select a subject you have some knowledge about, or something you enjoy. If you have a hobby, like diecast toys or antiques, then write about that. If you are simply a mom whose kids have given her tons of hilarious things to write about (like Erma Bombeck), then write about that. Whatever it is you choose, you have to be able to write from knowledge and experience. Don't think you can start a blog and copy stuff from all over the internet. That just won't fly for AdSense.

So, now that you've picked a subject you have to decide on a name for your blog. Think of a couple that match your subject matter, mainly because someone else may already have a blog with the name you pick, so you want to be ready with a second choice. Or, you can simply use your name, like "Gracey's" or "What Gracey Thinks".

To begin you have to sign up so you type www.blogger.com into your search bar and find the home/sign up page. Then, you sign up for a free account, and when your registration is complete you'll be presented with a "blogger dashboard" (click the images to see a larger view).

On the dashboard, you can select your language, and click the "create a blog link".



Next you'll be presented with a page where you name your blog, and select the URL (blog address or web address) that you'll use for your new blog. When you type in the blog name and URL (the url can be the same as your blog name if nobody is using it) click the link to check if it's available. If so, you can continue and fill in the captcha letters. If someone else is using it, you have to pick a new one and try again.

Once you click the "continue" button you'll be presented with a page where you can pick a blog template - this is the design or the way the blog will look.



Select a design by clicking the button under it. It doesn't really matter much what you choose to get started with - changing the template later is easy, and takes nothing more than clicking a button. Customized template designs are something for those with a litle experience, so we're starting with the basics offered in blogger.

Click continue and you'll get a page like this:


So now the basic layout and setup has been finished and your blog is ready for you to start typing in. Click the start blogging button and it takes you to a page where you can enter your first post.


This is the "blog editor" or "wysiwyg editor". It's what you'll use to enter information and images, even videos into your posts.

Across the top of the editor are options like "font" (in a drop down box) where you pick the type of lettering you want, next is a large and small T with an arrow - when you click that you make your text bigger or smaller.

The "b" lets you make bold text (highlight the text by clicking, holding down your mouse button and dragging across all the text you want to make bold, then click on the "b"); the little i gives you italic text (done the same way as you get bold).

The T with the coloured box changes your text colour; the small globe with the chain link across the top helps you make links.

The next series with all those little lines let you decide whether your text starts at the left (left justified), or is centered, or is right justified, or is justified across the entire page.

The small lines with numbers next to them lets you make a numbered list, the ones with little squares lets you make a bulleted list.

The quotation lets you make a block quote, and the ABC with the check mark is a spell-checker. Next to that is a tiny picture - click that to insert an image from your computer or an address on the internet. The next little picture lets you add a video, and the last icon - is an eraser that removes formatting from a specific selection of text.

Okay, so now you know it all. Well, not exactly, but you should have an idea of how to get started.

To write your first post, you simply start typing in the editor's text box. It works like most text boxes.

When you are finished entering your article, or story or text, you can add labels for your post. This helps search engines and readers find your content - labels work a little bit like keywords do. Then, you click "publish post" and you can click the "view blog" link at the top to see your blog with it's first post.


There are a lot of things not covered here because this post is already very long. The next one will cover the settings in your blog, and how to change the header to use an image, how to change the colour of the the navbar (that bar at the top), how to add gadgets to your sidebar and other fine-tuning details of setting up a blog that not only has good and interesting articles, but that looks good too.

Until then, make some posts and explore your blogger options. Oh - one thing - don't mess with the templates html unless you know what you are doing, and DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT try to monetize your blog at this point. Leave that until you've got some content worthy of having advertising on it.

AdSense Privacy Policy - Adding it to Blogger Blogs

In the last few months or so I’ve had to make use of the google help forums and discovered that there is a never-ending stream of questions coming into the help centers. Some quite simple, but others much more complex. What I also discovered is that help can sometimes be as simple as pointing someone to the right link in the vast network of google help links.
I am no expert on google or it’s help systems, but for the most part I have learned how and where to find help when I need it. What you’ll find though, is that getting a direct answer from any person who actually works for or is approved by google is difficult, at best.
Any email to support generally results in a form-letter reply directing you to a help forum for the area you are asking about. Considering the shear number of emails that must head towards google help centers every minute of every day, that really isn’t all that surprising.
I doubt any one entity that large could respond with personal emails to that volume of mail. But the help centers can be very useful once you learn how to navigate them.
While not related to all the google categories where you can find help, I’ve created a tutorial to help bloggers out a little bit – it walks you through the steps to add a Privacy Policy to your blogger blog, using written instructions as well as pictures in an easy-to-follow step-by-step manner.

Please note that this .pdf tutorial was updated Dec. 6, 2010 to include using your privacy policy on a static page on blogger with the pages gadget.

Adding A Privacy Policy to A Blogger Blog 

(please note:  unfortunately due to people trying to link directly to the server to to allow this to be downloaded from their own sites, I've had to password protect the tutorial. The password to open the file is: getthisfromgracey)
 
Links to Help Forums

Google Help Centres – all one page for all your google services

SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY TEXT

Privacy Policy

We take your privacy seriously. This policy describes what personal information we collect and how we use it. (This privacy policy is applicable to websites falling under the primary holder fill in your website(s) and urls here.)

Routine Information Collection

All web servers track basic information about their visitors. This information includes, but is not limited to, IP addresses, browser details, timestamps and referring pages. None of this information can personally identify specific visitors to this site. The information is tracked for routine administration and maintenance purposes, and lets me know what pages and information are useful and helpful to visitors.

Cookies and Web Beacons

Where necessary, this site uses cookies to store information about a visitor's preferences and history in order to better serve the visitor and/or present the visitor with customized content.

Advertising partners and other third parties may also use cookies, scripts and/or web beacons to track visitors to our site in order to display advertisements and other useful information. Such tracking is done directly by the third parties through their own servers and is subject to their own privacy policies.

Controlling Your Privacy

Note that you can change your browser settings to disable cookies if you have privacy concerns. Disabling cookies for all sites is not recommended as it may interfere with your use of some sites. The best option is to disable or enable cookies on a per-site basis. Consult your browser documentation for instructions on how to block cookies and other tracking mechanisms.

Special Note About Google Advertising

Any advertisements served by Google, Inc., and affiliated companies may be controlled using cookies. These cookies allow Google to display ads based on your visits to this site and other sites that use Google advertising services. Learn how to opt out of Google's cookie usage. As mentioned above, any tracking done by Google through cookies and other mechanisms is subject to Google's own privacy policies.

About Google advertising: What is the DoubleClick DART cookie? The DoubleClick DART cookie is used by Google in the ads served on publisher websites displaying AdSense for content ads. When users visit an AdSense publisher’s website and either view or click on an ad, a cookie may be dropped on that end user’s browser. The data gathered from these cookies will be used to help AdSense publishers better serve and manage the ads on their site(s) and across the web. Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Some third-party avertisers used by Google may use a different cookie. You may opt out of most-third party advertising cookies by following this link and visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page, or by visiting this Consumers page to opt out of all advertising cookies.

Contact Information

Concerns or questions about this privacy policy can be directed to fill in your contact information here for further clarification.

(originally posted by the writer, me, on one of my other sites)

How Much Money Can I Make With AdSense?

Now that is a question that everyone would like a solid answer to. The problem is, there really is no standard answer. You can make a few cents a month to a few thousand dollars a month, but there's a whole lot of difference between the two, and how to get from one to the other is a long, hard job. At least if you do it honestly.

There are very few "ordinary folks" making thousands of dollars a month, and almost nobody who is new to AdSense will make this kind of money. Forget what you've read all over the internet - especially in those blogs that are all about making "easy" money.

Ordinary people (like me, and like you) can and do make a few thousand dollars a month (I don't), but not by sticking some ads on a couple of half-finished or just started blogs. THAT kind of money takes work, and usually multiple websites (of the dot com kind, seldom blogs), as well as long hours of hard-earned knowledge on the correct way to optimize for search and get real, organic, non-paid traffic.

There are organizations (such as large media sites, for instance) that do make thousands of dollars on their advertising, but many of these have been invited to be a "premium publisher" due to the sheer volume of daily visitors. That's a hard thing to come by, so while you might set your goals toward becoming a premium publisher, it isn't something you should count on early in your AdSense career. Work towards that goal, but in the meantime, don't forget to be realistic about your earnings.

The average blogger who writes their own articles (not copying work from elsewhere) once or twice a week (every week, regularly) can earn some pretty nice pocket money - anywhere from $100 to $500+ a month. But ONLY WITH WORK AND TIME invested in the project at hand. You can't open a dozen blogs with two or three posts on each one and expect to earn much more than a few cents a month.

Part of the reason people don't earn much (or in some cases almost nothing at all) is the advertiser's and what they are willing to pay. If you don't have much of an interest in your blog/website, the advertisers probably aren't going to be willing to put their ads on your site. Those that do may be some of the lowest paying advertisers, and of course, with very little content to interest visitors, you won't get much traffic and without traffic you aren't going to have much chance of getting anyone whose interested in any of the ads.

Getting started the right way can help you build up to a better income. The right way is not to create a blog just to earn money from. That might work for a month or two months, but there are so many "made for AdSense" blogs (blogs/websites designed around nothing but the advertising or earning fast cash) that sooner or later the traffic peters off to very little. Why? Because there are thousands of blogs out there doing the very same thing. The ones that are successful are the ones that really are making their income the right way, and have learned the best and most honest ways of keeping that income. All the rest who are riding along on the coat tails of those types of sites usually fail after a while. Partly because the author's of the blog aren't actually making much money and partly because they copy articles from other more successful blogs.

Copying articles from someone whose work is successful doesn't guarantee you the same success. After all, the original writer is already getting all the traffic you are hoping for, and that isn't likely to change.

You need to provide something other people aren't, or at least provide something fewer people are doing.

So when we see questions like "how much am I going to make on average" in the forum, the answer is essentially "nobody knows". How much you might make depends on how much work and time you are willing to put into it.

If you aren't willing to work for your money, you aren't going to keep getting it for long. There is no free money, and very little easy money. Nobody is willing to pay money for no work these days, not even AdSense.

How to win? Stay on the right side of the AdSense policies and terms and conditions, work hard, produce original content and articles, research SEO techniques, stay away from paid links, and work hard. (Yes, I know...I said that twice to make a point.)

Why You Need "Alt Text" Tags

What exactly is "alt text"? AltText is something you may have heard of, but aren't sure what it is, or what it's purpose is. When you upload an image to your blog, the "alt text" is the stuff you normally won't see, but it describes your image to those who can't visually see your image.

And there are other purposes - a search engine bot (robot) is what crawls through your website or blog and indexes your pages and posts. These bots can't "see" images, they only read text. If your image doesn't have alt text, the bot doesn't know it's there, so your article or website might look like it has a lot of big spaces to the bot, and very little actual content.

This is particularly a problem for those whose sites contain a large number of images - such as mine do. If you want to be indexed properly and have your sites and pages show up well in search engine results, you need to optimize your images by using alt text. It also makes it difficult to get approved for AdSense if you have a lot of images, but no alt text tags. After all, AdSense wants sites or blogs with a lot of good, original content. If it can't see your pictures, then there could be a lot of content "missing" as far as the AdSense bot is concerned.

Another good reason for using alt text is your visitors themselves. Some people still do have dialup connections, and some can be pretty slow when they need to load a lot of images. Because of this many dialup users turn off image loading in their browsers, which means they will only see a blank page if you have no text, or very little text and a lot of space where the images should be, or simply a bunch of boxes with red "x"s in them in place of your images. If you use alt text, these browsers will see that text so they will at least know what the image is.

And then there are those browsers who are blind, or classed as "legally blind". And before you ask, yes the blind do surf and enjoy the internet. At least when people consider them and use alt text for the images. There are voice programs which read text on internet pages that are used by the blind. Their computers read to them, but this software can usually only recognize text, just like a search engine bot. If there's no alt text, there's nothing for the software to read.

Lastly, if you own the image (and you should if you are uploading it) or if the image is being posted with permission of the owner, you can also add this text in the alt text area, or you can add a caption to the image so people are given proper credit for the images.

Those who don't use alt text as often as they can could be missing out on a lot of visitors.

So, how to put the alt text on your images? If you use a blog service like wordpress or blogger, they have box right in the imager uploader where you can type your alt text. Below are screenshots of how to add the alt text to your blogger images:

• upload your image into your post
• click the image to get the options box
• click properties
• type description in the text box that opens and click OK

Make your blog or website more accessible by using the Alt Text whenever you upload an image - this newer method works on old previously uploaded images as well!


(note: originally posted by me on another of my blogs)

Using the AdSense Help Forum Effectively

If you want to get answers that help resolve your problems or questions in the AdSense Help Forums, there are some things you can and should do before you start posting to the forums.

First, you need to read the AdSense Support Forums Terms of Service. You shouldn't post profanity, or advertising. You also must not use your website address as a signature. This is considered advertising. You can, however, use your Google Profile to list your websites if you so choose. Posters can access your Google Profile from your nickname on the forums. (You may post your website url in your question if it's necessary to the question, just not as a signature.)

Next, at the Help Forum "home page" you'll see a list of discussion categories. These links will bring up questions in each category, filtering out other categories. It's helpful to read through other postings, because often your question will already have been answered in someone else's post. On the right side of the page is a listing of "popular" discussions that may already answer your question as well.


At the bottom of the home page is a link to "browse all discussions". When you click on this you get all the discussions and threads in the forum, including some you should check before you begin a new post. At the top of the help forum discussions are "pinned topics". These are topics posted by AdSense/Google Employees, and often will include things like current problems (ie: "Known Issues"). If there are system bugs that many publishers are experiencing, you will probably find it here in the pinned section, unless it has already been resolved. Many duplicate complaint posts could be avoided if people would check the pinned topics first.

Another thing to do before posting your own topic is to search the forums. Just think about where you are. You are in a forum hosted and run by Google. And who are Google? They're the people who are pretty well known for their search engine, which means they do "search" extremely well. You should make use of this. Type your problem into the search bar at the top and click the "search help" button.


Look through the results and see if your problem (or a similar complaint or question) is there, and if it has been answered or not.

After doing all of that, if you still have a question that hasn't been asked or that is more specific than what's listed, then go ahead and post your question. Click the "post a question" link on the left menu.

How to Post an Effective Question

If you want an answer to your question, then you need to post a question that addresses your issue as clearly as possible and contains details. Questions like "I can't get approved" or "What's wrong with my website" or "Why?" are really not going to get you helpful answers.

Don't:

• post questions unrelated to AdSense problems
• post the full question in your title
• post one word questions (why? when? what? help!)
  
• post the same question over and over again (simply edit your question or post a "bump" and it will move back toward the top of the forum again)
  
• post "bumps" every minute
• post without checking the help articles (link is in left sidebar)
• post in any language except english (there are help forums available in other languages - down at the bottom of the page linked here is a drop down box with the avalilable languages for help forums)
• post spam (this will get you banned from the forum)
• post your email address, publisher ID or personal details
• post your website address unless the help you are asking for is AdSense related
  
• post personal insults and profanity
• post links to pornographic websites
• post adlinks in the forum

DO

• use a title related to your question
• post a full explanation and question within the body of the post. If your question doesn't make sense, we can't answer it properly without asking further questions.
• use the search function before posting
• read the help articles before posting
• include your website url if you think people need to look at your site to offer help (this is necessary for questions on ads that won't display, help with disabled accounts, ad placements, ads that aren't related to your content etc.)
• check your posts for answers instead of posting again
  
• try to be patient. There are a lot of questions every day and not that many of us to answer them.
• try not to take your anger a frustration out on the people answering your questions. Almost none of them are employed by Google or AdSense. Most of them are volunteers who are publishers, just like you. Unless a responding poster has "Google Employee" by/under their name, they are just ordinary folks trying to help others.

If you post a question and can't find it later, you can check your profile and see a listing of your questions. In the menu bar at the left is a link for "My Discussions" this will take you to your profile where all the questions you've asked are listed. You can click the link for the post you want and it will take you to that thread.

If you post a question that doesn't get answered, amend your original question to bring it back to the front of the forum where people can see it again. Posting the same question multiple times simply makes everyone annoyed. There are some types of questions that we just can't resolve in the forums, so you may not get an answer.

Please note that questions related specifically to how to place your AdSense code into your website are often more related to:

1. the specific website creator you are using
2. the webhosting or blog service you are using
   

than they are to AdSense. Unless one of the volunteers has used your specific website builder, questions of this nature may not get answered. Your best choice for questions relating to your website is to ask at the webhosting help center, or the web builder help sections.

Please try to remember that as AdSense publishers most of the volunteers have experienced similar problems and have experienced the same frustrations as you have. Please don't come into the forums with a nasty attitude towards those who are trying to help you. All this will do is make the volunteers reluctant to try and help you.

You can express your frustration, just don't make it a personal attack on your helpers. That won't resolve anything.

If your question is related to other Google services (YouTube, gmail, google search, blogger, etc.) then you need to ask your question in the help forum for the related product. You can start here at the "Getting Started with Google Help" page, or if you want to look at all the help forums and groups available for Google services and products you can do that here.