Before you start your first blog post you want to change some settings for you and your readers.  The setting I will be covering in this lesson are preferences that I set me blog for.  You may choose to changes these or not.  Lets get started!

First you will need to find the settings tab in your blogger dashboard.

Basic Setting

1. This is where you are going to add the title of your blog.  Make sure this matches the url that you picked when you started your blog.

2. In this box you are going to put a short description about your blog.   Be sure to describe it well and use keywords.

3. This box you want to leave checked as yes. This will allow Blogger to have your blog be in a rotation on the Blogger Home page.  A Listed blog may be linked to from Blogger.com, such as the Blogger home page, Blogger Play, and Next Blog.

4.  Leaving this boxed checked as yes will allow your blog to be included in the Google Blog Search and let the search engines crawl your blog..  This will give your blog more exposure from the search engines.

Global Settings

The Global settings can be found on the same basic settings page.  Here you will notice that you can select the updated editor.  I highly recommend this option as it gives you more features while editing and posting blogs posts, and this is what I use and will be showing you in future lessons.

Formatting

The formatting tab is where you will find settings like how many posts will show on your front page and date and time formatting.  You will notice that I have only 4 posts show up on my front page.  I don’t want my readers to be over whelmed with tons of blog posts.  By doing this you have to make sure that you have plenty of navigation for your readers.  I will be covering blog navigation for you readers in a future lesson.  You will also see that you can change the way that your date is displayed and the time stamp is displayed.  These are not super important, they are more preferences for you.   Also make sure you pick your correct time zone and language.

Comments

Comments are the life blood of a blog when it comes to a sense of community and social proof.   In the above screen shot you will notice a few important setting like showing your comments, who can post comments, and where they are placed.

1.  If you want to allow comments for all your posts this is where you will click the SHOW button.

2.  This is where you will decided who can post comments on your blog.  I strongly recommend allowing anyone to post comments.  If you are worried about spam there are a few ways that Bloggers allows to to prevent it.  This is covered in the next section.

3.  The comment placement again is a preference.  I like to use the full page, but this is totally up to you.

4.  Backlinks are a great way to show appreciation  for other sites and blogs linking back to your posts.

Comment Moderation and Spam Blocking

Spam in blog comments can be a huge problem.  Blogger has given it’s bloggers a few ways to block these comment spammers.

1.  Most comment spammers will visit a blog and post their spam on older posts, as a blogger may not check these older posts for spam comments.  You can moderate all comments, or set it so you only moderate posts for spam comments older than a certain amount of days that you specify.  You can even get an email when these comments pop up.

2.  Another way to prevent spam is to turn the word verification on.  I leave this off, but this is totally up to you.

3.  Leaving the profile images set to yes,  gives your readers and commentors a sense of community and identity.

4.  In this box you can add a number of email address to be notified when some one leaves a comment.  This is different from the spam email notification.