Things to know before you start a blog

If you have a nice theme/ template/ design in your blog, people will love to be on your blog and they will like to come back again. In blogging, the articles are the main thing, but a having a great looking design helps a lot to attract new visitors.The great part of blogging platforms is that, you could install new and gorgeous looking templates to give your blog a new and professional look. The best part is that there are many designers who are designing new templates everyday and giving away for free!

If you take a search for free blogger temlates on the internet, you will find sites with lots of great templates. eBlogTemplates.com is a great site which has free blogger and wordprss templates. Just browse their collection and choose what you like. When you have got the one you were looking for download it on your computer. The file will be on zipped format. Now right click on the file and click extract all. You will then find an .XML file. This is the main template.
Go to your blogger dashboard and click layout. Click on the edit HTML tab. Now you can see some HTML codes on the page, this is the main code behind your blog. To have the backup, click on download full template and save the template on your pc. Now click browse and locate the template .XML file which you have downloaded from the template website. Now click Upload. You will have to confirm the changes and then you will see the confirmation message.
Now see your blog in the new look. If you get into an error page or don't like the design, you can undo the changes, just upload the backup template from your pc and you will get your old design again.

Things to know before you start a blog

These are the terms which are used on blogging and their meanings,

• Visitor = A person who have visited your blog
• Hit = A single amount of visitor
• Unique visitor = A person who have visited the page once in 24 hours
• Page view = Number of pages viewed
• Traffic = Visitors/ Hits etc
• Search Engine = Google, Yahoo etc
• SEO = Search Engine Optimization, The strategy behind a successful site
• URL = Web address
• Monetize = Money making strategy
• Social Bookmarking = Adding a URL in social sites
• RSS/ Feed = Really Simple Syndication
• Backlink/ Linkback = A page linked from another site/ page
• Blogroll = A list of blogs/ sites on a page
• Front page = The main page of a blog
• Sidebar = The side that contains links etc
• HTML = Hyper Text Markup Language, The code behind a site
• Java Script = Code written in Java language
• Widget = Web gadged
• Podcast = Audio blog
• Vblog/ Vlog = Video blog
• Rank = The position of a website in serch engines
• Posts = The single article on a blog
  

Start a blog using Blogger(blogspot)

Blogger is my no 1 choice for beginners. Blogger/ blogspot is a free blogging platform which has many features. Blogger is easy and reliable. In the beginning, it was blogspot and then Google bought it and named it as blogger. Because it is owned and managed by Google, there are many services which can be used from blogger and its reliable. The main features of blogger are,

• Hosted in Google's server and there is no limitation of bandwidth
• There is no limitation of storage
• You can add adsense easily
• 1 GB photo storage using Picasa
• Unlimited video storage using YouTube
• Easy to understand
• Blogger allows you to use your own paid domain
• Its free!

I would recommend you to use blogger service and this is the service I'm using to host my blogs. Just go to blogger.com and click "Create your blog now." You will be sent to a page to create a Google account. If you already have a Gmail account, you can click "Sign in." To create a new google account, insert your existing email address like yourname@yahoo.com. Then set a password and click "Continue." Your email address will be your new google account.

Now on the blog creation page, fill out the name of your page and the address you want to set as the blog url. Your blog address will be yourname.blogspot.com, so use a nice address which is short and easily memorable. Then continue to next page and there you can select a template for your blog.
Your blogger "Dashboard" is the place where you can manage your blogs, posts, comments and settings. You can click on "New post" to create a new blog entry. Can click "Posts" to manage and edit your posts and click "Settings" to change a setting.
Once you have created some articles, you can change, delete or edit your articles whenever you want. Just click "Posts" on the Dashboard and you can see all of the articles on that blog.