How To Start Your Amazing New Blog for FREE!

How To Start Your Amazing New Blog for FREE!

My friends have always told me that I have a "way with words". Whether I'm telling a story or explaining how to do something, I have a certain way of drawing people in! For a long time, I didn't think much of it! My friends suggested many times that I start my own blog. I had heard of blogging and the potential success that comes with blogging but I just did not think blogging was for me! That is, until one day, my favorite collage-making and social media app company, Pic Collage, asked me to come and be a guest blogger for their weekly blog. It was SO much fun, and so much easier than I thought it would be! 

I finally decided to take my friends' advice! I started researching how to start my own blog! The first results that came up were Wordpress, Wix, and Weebly. 

I tried Wordpress, I didn't like the setup or the templates. Wordpress puts a lot of limits on what you can do with a free account. On top of that, they only give you 3 GB of storage space. That was WAY too little for me. You also can not use Google Adwords on Wordpress until you upgrade to a paid account.

I tried Wix, I REALLY liked the design options! However, the domain name that they give you with a free account is not very flattering. For example, let's say your Wix username was EllaBella345 and your blog name was Ellas Style. Your free domain would be ellabella345.wixsite.com/ellasstyle. If you only have one blog you might be okay with this. As for me, I planned on possibly opening multiple blogs, in which case each of my blogs would start out as, for example, ellabella345.wixsite.com/etc. This was very unappealing to me, so I kept looking!

I tried Weebly, the templates were okay but the storage space was horrible, only 500MB. This may sound okay but think of it this way,  1MB is equal to about 1 photo (or less depending on the image quality). Now when you start getting into videos, one video is about 250-500+ MBs. Now do you see why this is a BIG problem? Plus, I didn't like the way perfectlyleila.weebly.com sounded and you can not use Google Adwords on Weebly until you upgrade to a paid account.

I felt pretty discouraged at that point! I wanted a quality blog without having to pay hundreds of dollars a month for it! Especially since I wasn't even sure blogging was for me. A name I saw pop up on the free blog site lists a handful of times was Blogger. Every time I thought of blogger, I thought of this really ugly blog I saw one time. My first thought was, "Who in the world owns this?!" Then I thought, "What in the world did they use?! So that I can be sure to stay far, FAR away from it!!!" What did they use? Yep! Blogger! Out of desperation I gave it a try anyway. To my surprise, the templates were quite nice. Very simple, but nice! I picked the one I liked, customized it a bit, and then posted a couple of articles! 

After my second blog post, I LOVED IT! The key features that really helped make the decision for me were...

• Blogger is owned by Google, so you have the reliable company factor! 
• You do not need a paid account (which Blogger doesn't offer anyway) to run Google Adwords! All you need is for your blog to have been up for a minimum of 6 months or a large amount of traffic!
• The domain name is REALLY nice! My free domain name is perfectlyleila.blogspot.com! Which I actually prefer over perfectlyleila.com. But, hey! That's just my opinion! 
• If you don't want the "blogspot" domain, unlike Wordpress, Wix, and Weebly, Blogger offers FREE domain transfer! 
• Blogger offers UNLIMITED storage space! (No, you did not read that wrong, UNLIMITED!) You are free to post to your heart's content!
• You can even edit your blog post's permalink. What is a permalink? Let me explain, my website is perfectlyleila.blogspot.com. If you look at the URL for this post, the permalink for this particular post is, "how-to-start-your-amazing-new-blog-for-FREE". Say I wanted to change it to, how-to-start-blogging, all I would have to do is tap permalink (which you can access via the post settings drop-down menu), select custom permalink, and then just like that! change it to anything I like! (NOTE: You can not have the same permalink for all of your posts)

What made it even better is there are actually more templates for Blogger than there is listed on the site. All you have to do is search for "free website templates" or "free blog templates" (you can also switch out template with theme to get more results!) and you will find hundreds of amazing free templates! For those of you who are a bit confused about what a blog template or theme is, a blog template or theme is the look and layout of your blog site.

How do you add a new template to Blogger?

There are three websites I have personally tried for this, CSS Author, Gooyaabi, and Colorlib.

1. After you have chosen your design, tap download. The file will be downloaded as a zipped file. 
2. To unzip it, download a file unzip software or go to Unzip-Online. 
3. After you unzip the file, download the template file ending in .xml. 
4. Go back to Blogger and go to the "Themes" tab. 
5. Select "Backup/Restore"
6. Tap "choose file" and upload your new blog site theme! DONE!

Be sure to post the link to your amazing new blog site in the comments! I would love to check it out! I hope you found this article useful!

Thank you for reading!

- Leila ♡