Sunday, August 10, 2008

Setting up a Blogger Custom Domain

Setting up a custom domain for Blogger blogs is a frequent source of questions on Blogger Help. Chapter 10 of Blogger: Beyond the Basics from Packt Publishing covers the pros, cons, and tips on custom domains.

If you are looking for a step by step video on how to set up a custom domain for your Blogger blog, check out Purchasing and setting up a custom domain with Blogger on YouTube. The most important thing to remember is even after you purchase your domain, it takes time for the domain registration powers that be to publish your domain and for other servers on the Internet to recognize it.

Good luck and let me know how it turns out!

Friday, August 8, 2008

Blog it or Knol it?

Google recently announced the public launch of Knol, a single topic web site publishing and hosting tool. If you're familiar with Squidoo, then you instantly grasp knol. Be an authority on a specific topic and go in detail in a way it can be hard to do on a blog. You can also use it as a way to increase potential hits to your blog by linking your knols back to your blog.

So are there times you should use Knol without using Blogger at all? It's up to you, but if you want to do an article about a topic that has nothing to do with your regular blog, and don't want to create a new blog and maintain it, then Knol it.

Have a topic you posted on Blogger and want to dive deeper into the subject? Create a content rich article on Knol and link to your topic from Blogger.

Other potential uses for Knol:

  • Post podcast/videocast show notes for a set theme
  • List references for topics you've researched
  • Host an interest group about a topic on Knol (book club, community group, etc)
  • Promote your business with an article that provides free information
  • Write a FAQ