Keep in mind that the very best place for your business blog is on your website where it will help dramatically with the search engine optimization of your site.  With that said, Blogger is a Google tool and can be accessed with the same user name and password as your free Google account.  I have found it to be one of the easiest ways to get a blog up and running for my classes.  I actually prefer it, in many ways, to wordpress, which seems more complicated and doesn’t display digital photographs, in my opinion, as nicely. 

Follow the instructions below and get up and blogging in minutes using Blogger!

1. Go to http://www.blogger.com/
2. Click on the big orange button that says “Create a Blog!”
3. Just follow the three steps: – You need to Create a Google Account (if you don’t already have one, it is free of charge and doesn’t sign you up for unwanted e-mails or any other undesirables.) – You need to Name Your Blog (Blogger will tell you if the name you want is already taken) and you need to Choose a Template.
4. Now you can customize your website.
5. Click on the “Settings” tab and go through the option tabs. The most important for just getting started are the Basic, Formatting and Comments Tabs. Read the Comments section carefully as you fill it out.
6. Next go to the Layout Tab. You can customize your blogsite from here and add all kinds of cool gadgets in the right column such as a profile for you, followers, an archive of your blog posts, lists of blogs you recommend, a list of your other blogs (if you have others), your contact information including active links to your website and etc.
7. Once you start writing your first blog notice the functions across the top. They are a lot like word-processing options. You can choose different fonts, make your text larger or smaller, choose bold or italic (underline is reserved for links), choose font colors, create links to other internet sites, put your text flush left, centered, flush right or justified; create numbered or bulleted lists, block paragraphs, do spell check (oh so important for yours truly!) and embed pictures or movies in your blog, and erase all the formatting in your blog. WOW! What lot of options!
8. Notice in the upper right that you can “preview” what you have created so far at any time, look at and edit the HTML (I know a smattering of Spanish and html. They both come in handy.) In compose mode you see pretty much what you would see in Microsoft word as you type.
9. Under the text box you will see the words “Post Options” in blue text. When you click here you can change the date and time of the posting. I used this to put all the Twitter entries UNDER the Welcome post, even though I actually wrote them “later” than the Welcome post and thus, they would normally be at the top. (Most recent posts show at the top of blogs.
10. There is also a small text box for entering keywords. If you want the search engines to find your blog, put in lots of keywords here. Blogger will save as you go every few minutes or you can save manually. (Rule of thumb: Save often!
11. Once you click “Publish Post” off it goes to your blog. This doesn’t mean you can’t go back and make corrections, additions or changes. Simply go to “Posting” and then “Edit Posts.” You will see a list of ALL your posts, even ones that you have left in draft and haven’t published yet.

*********
A note about Wordpress.com: You can also make great blogsites using Wordpress.com (more about that another time.) I prefer Blogger because I love putting in photographs and the pictures are much brighter and nicer in Blogger, I think, than in Wordpress.com. BUT in wordpress you can create extra pages for your blog that look just like pages of a website and you have many more templates (themes) to choose from!

See my wordpress blog at http://www.marketing4introverts.wordpress.com/.

• Notice that I put in a “Best Posts” page because some of the first blog posts were really important.
• Icould also include an “About Us” page, which is not an option with Blogger/Blogspot  and, most importantly … 
• I was able to include in a “Programs for Marketing Introverts” page that lists options people have for working with me.

Because of these extra options, Wordpress.com may be a better option for you than Blogger.