Category: Blogs

Well I finally have my other blog for blog topics all set up. It is called Blog-World Watch. The real reason for the set up is not to make more work for myself, but that I am doing a white paper on the use of Blogspot publishing and custom domains versus FTP publishing on www.Blogger.com with archives and posts back on your own hosting server.

I will be analyzing traffic over a two month period and am tracking site traffic with Urchin on this blog and Google Analytics on Blog-World Watch. Not only am I trying to really determine in quantifiable terms whether you do of do not get search engine benefits with Blogspot, but I am also trying out all of the very cool new Ajax widgets that the new Blogger is showcasing and will be reviewing them as well. Look for major changes in our blog section of our website as we identify what will work best for our client needs.

This should be a very interesting white paper so stay tuned. I’ll make sure to announce it here when it is ready. In the meantime, I encourage you to build my traffic :0) (hint, hint) on Blog-World Watch, by kindly going to visit it every now and then. I would much appreciate that so that I can have some traffic to evaluate.

Blog-World Watch will be focused on ghost blogging, blogging for search engines, how to make money with your blog and can you make money, new blog platforms and widget reviews for Blogger. I think that you will find it as interesting as this blog. I look forward to seeing you there!

I have it figured out – how to set up custom domains on Blogspot. Click in to our sister blog Bog-World Watch for the full information and set up steps. It is not complicated, but why reinvent the wheel when you can learn from my mistakes.

Okay, finally, I am a power user with Blogger and I even had problems setting up a custom domain on the new blogger. But I finally have it figured out so here’s the low-down on how to do it.

1. Sign up for a blog on http://www.blogger.com/ and pretend that you want it to be hosted at Blogspot. Don’t click anything that asks for custom FTP settings. Do that and you won’t get any of the new Ajax tools and widgets from the new Blogger interface.
2. Click the Settings tab and then the Publish tab. Here you will enter in your custom domain name. My Blogspot name for this blog was http://nancymccord@blogspot.com. I entered in the custom domain place http://blog.mccordweb.com/.
3. This is where is got confusing. I thought that for my blog to show, I had to go to http://www.mccordweb.com/ and set up a subdirectory domain. You do NOT have to do that. In fact if you do that the publishing feature will not work and your blog will not show.
4. However, this next step is crucial. You must log in to your hosting account, domain account, or whatever and add a CNAME listing tied to your domain name. I use Hostway for my hosting account. So I logged into my domain name management ine the DNS manager section and added a CNAME in this fashion on the left I entered blog (it will not work if you enter blog.mccordweb.com) on the right I entered ghs.google.com and then clicked enter. This allows Blogspot to link up the blog properly to your custom domain. Any deviation and the custom domain will not work or be visible.

That’s it. Seems simple enough, but there was not concise information on the Web and clearly from the forums and blog posts on this topic many and I mean many people have had big problems with this set up.

You’ll want to subscribe to both of our blogs! Blog-World Watch and Web-World Watch.

Blog-World Watch is my newest endeavor and will focus on blogging, ghost blogging, blogging ethics, best blog practices, how to set up custom domains, and much more. It is the blog arm of our popular blog on search engines and search engine marketing.

As I use this blog and track its traffic in the next month or two, I will be creating a white paper about using Blogspot and the new Blogger interface for my clients. It will be a white paper that you surely will not want to miss.