Distinguish Yourself!
When you’re starting a new blog, its the easiest thing in the world to go with one of the standard templates, or you might be a little more adventurous and go with one of the many custom templates that can be found all over the internet. This can be fine if you’re just starting out and you just want to get a feel for things, but if you’re serious about your blogging career I would caution you to try and be as unique as possible.
This is not as hard at it might sound. Here’s a list of different pointers that I believe will help you to get started if you’re using blogger.com.
- Use one of the minima templates. Some of the other templates are very hard to customize, and with a little bit of work you can make the minima template look very unique. Its easy not to chose minima because its so plain, but trust me on this one. My blog uses a minima template.
- Register your own domain. You can still host your blog for free on blogger or wordpress or any of the many free blog hosting services out there, but you should definitely get your own domain name, and you should get it as soon as possible.
- If you don’t like the colors of your template you can edit them by clicking customize on the navbar and clicking the colors and fonts tab. Here they allow you to change quite a bit, make sure you get the right color combination right, its no good having a bunch of colors that don’t match.
- Make your blog easy on the eye. I’ve seen some blogs with a black background and gray writing, or blog posts in different colors. When it comes to blogs simplicity is the key. Chose contrasting colors for the background and the writing. Check out my blog for a good idea of what I mean, the background is a light color and the writing is a darker color, but the two colors still match.
- Make your own banner. This is very important. A picture is worth a thousand words, most people will forget what your blog looks like if you don’t have a banner, but if you have a nice banner that stands out, they will never forget it, and it might help them become regulars.
- Find what works and stick with it. If you’re always changing the look of y0ur blog simply because you’re bored, you won’t be able to create a permanent image in your readers mind. So be patient and stick with it.
Most importantly you have to be eager to learn. If you have an idea for something you’d like to see on your blog, don’t give up just because you don’t know how to do it, look around, there are a lot of very experienced bloggers out there with a wealth of information. And if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask, I will help you in any way I can.
If you have any ideas or experiences that have helped your blog, please share them with us by leaving a comment.
Simon
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