There is a certain amount of insurance about having your blog at your own domain, rather than at somedomain.blogspot.com. If for whatever reason, Google decides that Blogger doesn’t fit into its business model and isn’t making enough money, it could decide to wind down the service. Unlikely, but possible. If this happens after your blog has generated heaps of backlinks to the blogspot.com address, you’ll lose all those backlinks. It is also possible that Google might remove your account if it thinks you’ve breached its terms and conditions. Having your own domain can also look more professional.

Theoretically, you can have the ease of having a Blogger blog and still use your own domain using a technique called “mapping” where your domain name is made to point to your Blogger blog. So any posts at your Blogger blog will look like they are being hosted at your domain. 

We say “theoretically” because we haven’t found Google’s redirect service to work that well, and a quick search of Google will confirm that this is quite a common problem. We did manage to get it to work, but after a few different attempts.

We’d recommend that you make the choice to use your own domain early on because if you can’t get the mapping to work, you can just use another blog service and you don’t have to worry about losing audience.

There are two ways of doing the mapping, you can purchase your domain directly from Google and they will do all the setting up of the mapping for you automatically or you can purchase your domain separately and do the changes yourself. We’ll go through both options.

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The Daily Inspired is written by Antonio Lupetti from Rome, Italy. While its intended audience is web designers, there are plenty of design resources that are useful to anyone that has a website like these 10 Beautiful icons set for web developers and designers or these Free tools to create your own social network Facebook-like. 

As the name of the blog promises, there’s plenty of design inspiration such as this Creative way to present yourself in a 40 second long video.

Even if you don’t have the tools or the inclination to try out some of his tutorials like Design a nice pencil and handwritten style Woork like, it’s helpful to be exposed to these design principles and ideas to keep our perspectives broad.

The Daily Inspired is actually a Blogger blog with a custom theme even though it looks like a more advanced blogging system like WordPress. It goes to show you that Blogger is surprisingly flexible. Antonia has kindly let his readers download his custom theme but he warns that it is not for beginners and only for people who are relatively confident with HTML/CSS.

By default, Blogger installs a navigation bar that lets readers search your blog – unfortunately, it also comes tied to a “Next Blog” button that adds a link to another randomly chosen Blogger blog.

If you remove the “Next Blog” button then you also lose your search bar. 

There are a number of ways that you can add search bar back to Blogger. We think this is the simplest (kudos to Clemens Lee) but we’ve added a couple of links to other methods at the end. 

Blogger lets you easily add “gadgets” to your blog through the Layout tab. (See Step 12 in How to set up a Blogger blog.) You can add search bars for YouTube, or searches for Amazon but strangely enough in the regular Blogger gadget tool, you can’t add a search for your own blog. There was an experimental tool developed that we link to at the end of this post, but it gave very poor search results which is bizarre when you consider that Google who own Blogger are the world’s biggest search providers.

1. Go to the Layout tab and make sure you are on “Page Elements”. Choose whether you want your search bar in the side bar (1) or at the bottom of your page (2). We’ve gone with the side bar so that it’s easier for people to find. Be aware that if you have a different template, your template may look a bit different. Click on “Add a Gadget” in the location where you want it. When you’ve finished remember to hit “Save” (3).

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Business Model Design and Innovation is a great example of how your blog can be a powerful tool in establishing your authority in a field. And yes, it’s a Blogger blog.

Alex Osterwalder is a consultant and speaker on business model design and innovation. He credits his blog with being the primary source of clients and speaking engagements. He writes 1-2 posts a week (spending 2-8 hours), gives away almost everything for free, pays attention to making sure that his blog ranks for the search term “business model innovation”, got himself referenced on Wikipedia and makes sure there is actual examples of himself speaking on his blog.

He has some good reference articles such as What is a Business Model? but what’s particularly great about Alex’s blog is that he makes very good use of multimedia – posting for free his presentations at various conferences.

Here’s a recent interview he did:

Alexander Osterwalder over businessmodellen from erwin blom on Vimeo.

He also posts a talk he made on the importance of business model innovation. It’s really inspirational stuff – how to approach your business so that it can innovate competitive advantages.

First, Alex has posted his presentation slides (using SlideShare).

He also gives readers the option of seeing the 45 minute live presentation (via Google Videos). 

Even though the sound/lighting is poor (he does apologise for it), his talk is so interesting and Alex is a great speaker. 

He is now planning a book because of his web success and he will undoubtedly already have a ready made audience.

If you’re using your blog for business, you should be aware that Blogger has a feature that can undermine your blog’s professionalism.

By default, Blogger blogs will all feature a Navigation bar at the top of the blog like this:

When someone clicks on the “Next Blog” link, they are sent off to some random other blog that you have no control over. If you do send your readers off your page, it should be to something that you know is worthwhile and of value to them – you can guarantee this with the “Next Blog” button feature. At this stage, there it doesn’t even seem to send readers to a blog with similar keywords. You could have a blog on your legal practice and the button could send someone to a blog on collecting string – not the best look.

It’s often listed as one of the biggest downsides to having a Blogger blog. Fortunately, there is a way to remove the “Next Blog” button… Read the rest of this entry »