Blogger, which is owned by Google, happens to be one of the easiest platforms to start a blog for free and make money with that free blog.

If you are interested in starting a free BlogSpot blog, this guide will take you though the processes involved.

A blog is simply the easiest way available for publishing your ideas on the web for others to see.

It encourages you to get ideas out of your head and into the world, which then allows you to further develop them and give you a chance to showcase those thoughts as well as your passions and talents to others.

In the process of sharing your ideas with world, then you begin to see other benefits associated with blogging.

There are a lot of paid platform to start a blog. We have a guide to help you start a self-hosted WordPress blog.

However, if you have low budget and you are interested in starting a blog for free, then blogger is the ideal platform for you.

Blogger is by far the easiest platform to set up a free blog and make money from it.

I will be taking you through all the rigorous processes involved in setting up your free professional looking BlogSpot account in under 10 to 15 minutes.

The steps involved in Creating a free Blog with Blogger

Step 1. Sign up with Gmail to get a free Email account

This is the basic requirement for setting up a free Blogger account. You need tosign up with Gmail to get a free email account. If you already have a Gmail account, you can skip to step 2.

It will be required of you to provide a phone number from your resident country. Fill out the form and choose your preferred email address. A code will be sent to that your country specific phone number to verify that you are not a robot.

Once you get the code and verify your account, Congratulations, you have for yourself a new Gmail account.

Step 2. sign up with blogger using your Gmail account

On your browser visit www.blogger.comand click on ‘create your blog‘.

it will be required of you to enter the new Gmail address you have just acquired and the password of that Gmail account.

Enter the details of your Gmail account and click on Next. You will be logged in to your blogger dashboard immediately.

Step 3. Create your blogger or Google+ profile

Click on any of them. It will display a form where you will fill in the name you wish to be associated with on your blog. You could choose to create a Google+ profile, if you currently do not have one.

Step 4. Create your first free blog on blogger.

You will get a message saying, ‘You are not an author on any blogs yet, create one now to start posting!’ Just go ahead and click on ‘Create New Blog’ to get started with the creation of your first free blogger blog.

Enter the title of the Blog you wish to create. For example, “Virtue Writing Blog” or you could choose to customize it with your name. “MattStevesBlog”… (I’m using mine here).

After entering the title of your blog, the next thing you will be needing to do is to choose an address for your blog.

You blog address should be similar to the blog title you have just chosen. Let’s say virtuewriting.blogspot.com or mattstevesblog.blogspot.com.

Note: your desired BlogSpot address may have been taken by someone else. If that is the case, just keep trying other friendly suggestions that are easy to remember.

If for example, virtuewriting.blogspot.com has been taken, you could try using virtueblogging.blogspot.com. Just keep tweaking it till a desired name is
gotten. You will get a blue mark sign to show your blog name is available..

Step 5. Choose a Theme for your blog

One of the most important part of setting up your blog is getting a theme that gives your blog a fascinating and professional look.

Blogger provides you with some beautiful themes which are very easy to customize. If you are looking for a default blogger theme, I recommend Emporio Theme. The Emporio theme has a simple and professional look, plus it is very easy to customize.

The Emporio theme should be located in your blogger dashboard.

Click on theme, scroll down the list of default themes on blogger, it should be among the list of featured themes.

You may however not find the Emporio theme fascinating and may want something different. Just browser through other default themes on blogger.

If you can’t find a suitable default blogger theme, then, the next alternative you have will be buying a blogger theme, or choosing one of the free ones available.

There are a lot of free blogger themes on the internet. Colorlib provides some of the most beautiful and professional blogger themes for free. Futuremag designed by Colorlib is one of the best free themes you can get.

See beautiful themes you can choose for your Blog.

Note: the best themes usually require that you pay for them. The free ones are only manageable. So, if you really want a quality blogger theme, you might want to pay to get one of the best blogger themes. They usually cost less than $50.

Step 6. upload a custom theme to blogger

If you want to upload a custom theme you downloaded from an external website to your blog, it is really easy to do.

First, download the theme of your choice. After download, what you get is a zip folder. Extract the zip folder and you will discover a file with .xml extension. Save that file where you can remember. That’s the file you will be needing to upload to your blogger template designer.

After downloading and saving the theme on your computer, applying it to your blog is very easy. On your blogger dashboard, in the left menu options, click on Theme.

Locate Backup/Restore from the top-right corner and click on it.From the options given in the new window that pops up, click on browse and locate the theme you downloaded earlier and select it.After selecting it, click on ‘upload’ to apply the newly downloaded theme on your blog. It is applied almost instantly.

Step 7. Customizing your blogger theme

Before you move on to this… you might want to take a look at your newly downloaded theme. On a new window, type your blog address to see how your new theme looks like, and take note of all the features you might want to remove or modify. Go back to your blogger dashboard and click on Layers from the left menu options. You will see a page that looks like the map of your
blog.

In this Layout menu, you can remove, add or modify any gadget, click on preview after you have removed or modified any gadget to see the impact it has on your blog before clicking on “save arrangement” when you are done.

Organizing the look of your blog can never be a done job. You might want to remove or add any gadget. The Layout menu is where everything is done. Remember to always ask questions on the blogger help forum if there is anything you are not finding any luck with. Or you can contact me for help using the comment section. I’ll carve out time to address every single issue.

Step 8. Publishing your first post

After customization of your template as you desire, the next thing you might want to do is to publish your first post.

On your blogger dashboard, click on Post.

You will get a message saying: “there are no posts. Create a new post.”

Click on new post as indicated in the image below.

After typing your post, you can preview, save it in your draft or publish your post to the web. But before doing that, check out the tips below.

Wrapping up

Let’s face the fact, for a newbie concerned, setting up a free blogger account is by far the most reasonable and comfortable choice to make.

A lot of people have started free blogs on Blogger, and made thousands of dollars with their free blog.

see: how to make money with a free blog.

But my advice to you is, get a domain name for your free blog. A domain name is completely free to set up on blogger. It’s not like other platforms where you have to pay to set up a custom domain.

If you want to learn more about blogger, then you might want to read my post that offers a detailed blogger review.