Many of you fellow bloggers are using Blogger.com as your blogging platform since it's easy to setup and use. That's fine, but have you made any plans for the future? How many big, successfull and profitable professional blogs have you seen lately using Blogger as platform?

Blogger is using subdomains as standard (i.e. sampleaddress.blogspot.com) which is harder to remember for your visitors then www.sampleaddress.com or blog.sampleaddress.com. Another downside is that a Blogger subdomain can't be moved if you would like to change blog software, install plugins, etc.

The solution is to use your own domain name already from the beginning and Blogger got two solutions for you. That way you don't have to redirect or ask your visitors to bookmark another URL if you move your blog and you can use your own brand the whole way

DNS

This way you redirect your domain name or a subdomain of your own domain name (i.e. blog.sampleaddress.com) to Blogger. If you don't have a domain name already you can buy it from Google. Inside Blogger you simply just click on "Settings" and "Publishing":

If you already got a domain name you would like to use, you switch over to the advanced option and fill in your already registered domain name. The advanced option require you to change DNS settings for your domain name and that require some work in your registrars domain control panel. Luckily most registrars got easy to follow instructions for that and Google will tell you exactly what you need to change.

FTP publishing

This means that Blogger will send all files to your server (i.e. www.sampleaddress.com/blog/) instead of you redirecting your domain name to Blogger. This option is perfect for you if you can't change DNS settings for your domain name or if you absolutely need to have your blog in a directory instead of using a subdomain for example.

To use this option you must accept anyone as a reader and you have to use a classic template. To set this up you simply visit the same page as in the example above ("Settings" and "Publishing"). Select the FTP option and fill in all your FTP details. If you don't have your FTP details you can get them from your web hosting provider.

As soon as you've saved your settings Blogger will start sending all your files to your hosting account. Every time you post a new post blogger will send the new and the updated file to your server, so it's important that you update your settings at Blogger if you for example change the FTP password.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 10:21 am and is filed under Blogging, Domain Names, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.