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Blogger and GoDaddy - Step By Step How-to

There are a lot of ways to monetize your domain name, but one of the cheapest and easiest solutions is to setup a blog and use the incoming traffic (SEO, paid advertising, type in or other) to generate revenue. How you choose to generate revenue from your blog depends on what you want to do with your blog... For example, you can become an affiliate and sell/promote items for sale, or you can place ads and get revenue from click throughs. You can also just promote that the domain name is for sale.

So what does any of that have to do with GoDaddy and Blogger? Well, I've found, through setting up a number of sites in various ways, that Blogger is a great platform for developing quick, search optimized sites. I also really like GoDaddy's name registration services, including the full control over domain forwarding, masking and DNS records. When you use the two together you can take advantage of the SEO power of a great keyword domain name combined with the ease of use (and free hosting no less!) of Blogger. But, getting the two to cooperate can be a bit tricky. Once you get the steps down though, you can get your Blogger based site up and running in just a couple of minutes. So here we go:

Step 1. Register your domain name with GoDaddy.com. If you already have a domain name through another registrar, you may want to consider transferring your domain to GoDaddy as they offer some great deals for transferred domains as well, including adding an extra year to your registration for like 6 bucks (or less). Anyway, from here on out we will assume you have a domain at GoDaddy.com. We'll call this domain UtterDomain.com for simplicity.

Step 2. Create your Blogger blog. When you create your blog it'll ask what domain name you want to use. For now, go ahead and name it along the lines of UtterDomain.blogspot.com. This really isn't going to be used so if that particular name isn't available, it's okay to try variations as long as it has some semblance of meaning.

Step 3. Login to GoDaddy.com's Domain Manager. Find your domain and verify that you are using GoDaddy's "Hosting Nameservers". If you've previously setup your domain to point to a different host, or if it was previously parked, you'll want to modify the DNS settings under the "Nameservers" menu option and select the "Hosting Nameservers" option. You may need to wait a few minutes for this change to take affect.

Step 4. Click on the option under your Domain called "Total DNS Control and MX Records". Find the entry under the CNAMES section called www. If you do not see a www CNAME record, you will need to add it. The "Points to Host Name" needs to be set to ghs.google.com otherwise nothing will work. Once the www alias is pointing to ghs.google.com, you are almost done.

Step 5. If you have other sub domains that you were previously using, such as blog.UtterDomain.com, then you'll need to make sure that you have an A record for the subdomain ("blog" in our example) that is pointing to the same IP address as your "@" A record. The reason for this is due to step 6. If you don't want or need another subdomain besides www, then you shouldn't mess with the A record at all.

Step 6. Configure domain forwarding. We want UtterDomain.com to resolve to our blog as well as www.UtterDomain.com, right? Well, in order to do that we need to go back to the domain manager for UtterDomain.com and click on the Forward menu option. Select the option to enable forwarding, then type in either http://www.UtterDomain.com or http://UtterDomain.blogspot.com (I prefer the first option). Also select the option for "301 - Moved Permanently" and save your changes. Your GoDaddy side of the setup is now complete. We just need to let Blogger know which domain name to use.

Step 7. Login to Blogger, go to the "Settings" tab and then choose "Publishing". If you haven't already, you'll need to choose the "Custom Domain" link and then click the "Advanced Settings" option. This is where you'll enter your url (http://www.UtterDomain.com) and ensure that you include the www as Blogger won't be happy without it. Don't worry, anyone who forgets to type in the www part will still be forwarded to your blog.

Step 8. Wait and Test. Within 24 hours (and often times in as little as a couple of minutes), your domain settings will propagate out to the world and you should be able to browse to your blog with or without the www.

Troubleshooting:

1. If you've configured Google Apps you'll need to disable it prior to publishing through Blogger.

2. If you've configure your CNAMES and A records properly and configured forwarding and waited 24 hours, but one or both of your domain names are not working properly, you may need to contact GoDaddy support. I've only had this happen once and it was one of the first ones I setup (when I still didn't know what I was doing!). It's not the end of the world to ask GoDaddy to verify your setup just ensure that you provide them with an adequate explanation of what you are trying to do.

3. If all else fails, drop me a line here and we'll see if we can't figure out what went wrong. I can't provide support for GoDaddy but I've gone through the setup enough times and in enough different ways that I may have suggestions.

Good luck!

2 comments:

  1. Mr. Utter Blogger. I have been searching and searching for a simple and step by step guide to use Google Analytics with a domain / hosted account with Go Daddy. I had been put through the CNAME records and have Webtools activated but would like something different than the free godaddy stats. There must be a way. Thank You

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  2. Godaddy Domain name said in this article Nice..I found the Domain name registration site it is the reseller of godaddy.com the site is tucktail.com..

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