How to Create Your First Blog Using Blogger

You’re ready to become a blogger by writing your very first blog post, an entry, for your new blog. Fortunately, the mechanics of writing a blog post aren’t much different from writing an e-mail.

Most posts are quite short and are written directly and conversationally, but you can make them as long as you want. Every blog takes on a personality and life of its own.

If you’ve used a Web-based e-mail service like Gmail, Hotmail, or MSN, blog software feels very familiar. Creating the post is simply a matter of filling in the appropriate fields in a form, formatting text, and then sending it off to its destination — in this case, to your blog, rather than a friend’s inbox.

1

Go to the Blogger publishing screen.

If you just finished signing up for your blog, click the Start Posting link to start a blog post; the publishing screen appears. If you’re coming back to Blogger, log in. Blogger takes you to the Dashboard — a kind of control panel showing you the blogs you have set up — giving you access to tools like posting, help resources, or even creating another blog. Click the New Post link on the Dashboard to get to the Publishing screen.

2

Enter a title for your post in the Title field.

Titles are a lot like newspaper headlines: catchy and informative so that they encourage visitors to your blog to continue reading.

3

Write your post in the large field.

Consider writing your blog posts in a standard word-processing program, such as Notepad or Microsoft Word, and saving the document. Many bloggers have spent hours composing right in the entry field of their blog software only to find that their Internet connection has failed or another technical problem has occurred, resulting in a lost post.

4

Format your post.

Blogger’s entry field includes icons across the top that let you change the font and font size, apply bold and italics to text, and create common formatting styles like lists. To use these features, select the text in the field that you want to modify by clicking and dragging over the text; then click the appropriate icon or select an option from the desired drop-down list.