How To Publish Online with Blogger Software

I should probably write more about how to publish online in this blog, since publishing on the Internet is what launched my business. It's also gotten a lot easier to publish online in the past couple years, thanks to blogging. This post was written with the free Blogger tool (the company belongs to Google) and it's as simple as writing in a word processor. I didn't design the graphics or the layout that you would see if you were reading this online, they are part of a standard template I chose. I just added a few links to major pages on my publishing site by editing that template one time, but if you're just starting out, you won't need to know how to do that since you won't have an existing site.

The first rule for online publishing is to own your own domain. It's not a question of legitimacy, a blog is a blog is a, you get the point. It's so when people link to your online writings, the links point at a domain that you can control. If you start publishing online hosting your blog at the free Blogspot rather than on your own domain, you'll effectively lose any links you build up when you move to your own domain, or change blogging software. The links are critical to establishing the value of your publishing effort in the eyes of the search engine, from which you're trying to get visitors.

The next rule for publishing online is to write what you know you're planning on publishing books about. This doesn't mean you can't make blog posts about related subjects, in fact, I encourage it. However, if you're planning on publishing books about business management and your passion is college basketball, don't kid yourself that posting about basketball every day is going to contribute much to the future of your book business. Today I'm writing about online publishing in support of my book about print on demand self publishing, and the two happen to be an excellent match. I won't even consider publishing a book on paper unless I'm getting at least a hundred visitors a day to related writings on my website.

I'm an absolute advocate of publishing online before publishing on paper. There's no more cost effective way to get feedback from your potential book buying audience about what they want to see in a book. If you've already published books and you're just looking into how to publish online now, you're better off starting with a full website where you can post multiple excerpts from your books to attract visitors and close the sale for you. If you're concerned about people ripping off your efforts, see my article about online copyright issues.

To get started with publishing online, just go to the Blogger site, do their free sign-up, chose a look for your site (a template, which you can always change later) and choose "FTP" for the posting option. Blogger will then use FTP to upload your blog posts to the domain you own (for which you're paying a monthly fee to a host), giving the main page any file name you choose. If it's the first page you're adding to the domain, name it "index.htm" If the site has been around a while, it's best to give it the name of an existing page you can do without, which will integrate the whole blog into your current site navigation. The Blogger software handles archiving and generating a unique HTML page from every post. Stay tuned, and I'll do a post about editing templates in the future.