How to Set Up Your GoDaddy Domain with Blogger

There are many advantages to using blogger as your website. Some of those advantages include an easy to use interface, pages for expanding your blog into a website, and most importantly, it’s FREE!

I recently helped a family member point her GoDaddy domain name to her blog. The instructions that GoDaddy or Blogger provided was not straightforward, so I want to ahead and post some helpful instructions that I found from eHow and TSKSOFT.

Things you’ll need:

* GoDaddy Domain Name
* Blogger Account

How to set up your GoDaddy settings:

1. Log into GoDaddy and go to Domains > My Domains.
2. Click on the domain that you want to use for your blog.
3. Find the “Total DNS Control and MX Records” link and click it.
4. Under the “Total DNS Control Panel,” locate “CNAMES(Aliases).”
5. Click on the pencil icon to edit it.
6. Set it as these settings exactly: “Enter an Alias Name: www” & “Points to Host Name: ghs.google.com” If you don’t know what TTL is, just leave it at 1 hour.
7. Hit OK.
8. Now we need to go back to the previous screen, the one where you found “Total DNS Control and MX Records,” but this time find “Forwarding:” and click on the link below it.
9. You will get a “Forward and Mask Domains” section pop-up at the top. Enter your URL with appended “www” as http://www.yourdomain.com, then tick “Update my DNS settings to support this change. (Recommended)”
10. Clicking the “Advanced Option” will show you that your URL is permanently forwarded (permanent redirect 301) to your specified http://www.yourdomain.com. You can click “Forward with Masking”
13. Finally, hit OK.

How to set up your Blogger settings:

1. Log into Blogger, go to “Dashboard,” pick a blog, and click “Settings.”
2. Under the “Settings” tab, click the “Publishing” tab.
3. Find this: “Switch to: • Custom Domain (Point your own registered domain name to your blog),” and click on “Custom Domain.”
4. Under the orange text that says “Buy a domain for your blog,” look for “Already own a domain? Switch to advanced settings.” It’s on the right side. Click “advanced settings.”
5. For your domain, enter your godaddy domain in the input box. It should include both the www. and the .com. An example would look like this: “www.domain.com”
6. Enter the word verification code, hit “Save Settings,” and you’re finished!

You’ll need to wait a few minutes before you can test out the forwarding and up to 24 hours before the domain name resolves to your blog.