How to claim your blog on Bloglovin (Blogger)

Today I'm back which another blogging tutorial: How to claim your blog on Bloglovin. Bloglovin is my favourite platform to use for following blogs but it's also the platform where my blog has the most followers. It can hugely benefit your blog to add it to Bloglovin because there are so many people who use it as their main way to keep track of all the blogs they read. So here is a quick, easy, step by step tutorial to show you how to add and claim your blog in Bloglovin. 

So before you can even add your blog to Bloglovin, you need to have an account. There are some of you who might already have an account just for following blogs that you can use, but if you don't, you need to create one (don't worry it's free). This is really simple. You just go to Bloglovin's site, and really easily sign up by entering your name, email address and new password for your profile. 

Step 1: Add your blog to Bloglovin

Once you are logged into your account, click on the search bar. A few things will come up automatically like suggested tags, but there should also be an option to 'Add blog'. If for some reason that isn't coming up, you can also click the icon with your profile picture on it and go to settings where there is a button to claim your blog.

How To Add Social Media Icons to Your Blog (Blogger)

Hey guys!! I'm back with another blog tutorial! This is the fourth blog post in this series, so if you haven't read the others yet, here they are: Creating and Adding a Header, Adding a Background, and How to Add the Follow Me on Bloglovin Button to the End of Each Blog Post. Today, I will be showing you how to add social media icons to your sidebar.

1. So the first thing you do is find free social media icons online. If you are more digitally skilled then you can design your own icons yourself, but this tutorial is for people who aren't that great at graphic design. Once you find the ones you like, make sure to save or download them for the next step. Here are the ones I chose for this tutorial:

2. Next you open the image you saved in paint. Crop the icons individually like in the pictures below and save them individually.

3. After you have done this to each of the icons, log in to Blogger and click to write a new blog post. You don't ever publish this blog post and you probably shouldn't delete it either in-case you ever need to edit your social media icons. Now insert the images of the icons that your saved individually, one after the other, until you have them all in the blog post.

4. Next, in another tab,  go to the first social media site that you want to link in the icons and copy the link to your page.

5. Go back to blogger and click on the first icon that you want to do. Once it is highlighted, click the link button (this usually takes two tries for some reason so if nothing happens the first time, highlight the icon image again and click the link button again). 

6. A box should appear with the title "edit link". Paste the link to your social media site into the box the says "which URL should this link go to?" and then click OK.

7. Do the last step for each of your social media icons using the link to the corresponding social media link. Basically, do the same for Google Plus with the link to your Google Plus page and the same for Twitter with the link to your Twitter page. Once you are done this, click HTML in the upper left corner.

8. Once you click HTML, the blog post will change to a code. Copy this entire code.

9. Next save the blog post or just go to another tab and click "Layout" in the Blogger menu. Once you are in the layout page, click "Add a Gadget".

10. Once you have clicked "Add a Gadget" a box/other window will appear showing you the type of gadgets you can add. Click to add the HTML/JavaScript gadget as shown below.

11. When the "Configure HTML/JavaScript" box is open, paste the HTML code that you copied from the blog post containing your social media icons into the content box. Then click save.

12. You can move the position of your gadget in the layout page if you aren't happy with it at the top. Go to your blog once you have saved the ideal position (ie. under your about me section or followers). You will now see something like the picture below with the icons on your blog that, when clicked brings you to your corresponding social media sites.

13. If you aren't happy with the way your social media icons are arranged (ie. two beside each other and one on its own), then go back to the draft social media icons blog post that you saved earlier and play around with the position of the icon. You can do this using the space button or by click on the images and clicking right, left or centre. Then go back to step 8 and continue on from there with the new HTML code for the blog post copied.

You might not be able to get the icons in the perfect arrangement that you want (ie. I had to settle for two icons across instead of three for my real icons on my blog) because this depends on the size of the images and the size of your sidebar but you can try adjust those if you really want them a certain way.

I hope you liked this blog post. If you have any questions or were a bit confused about a certain step then make sure to leave a comment below and I will do my best to help :)

How to add the "Follow Me on Bloglovin' " button to the end of each blog post

Hey guys, today I want to show you a quick tutorial on how to add the "Follow me on Bloglovin'" to the end of each blog post you write on Blogger so people can easily follow your blog. It's very easy to add one of these to the side of your blog using the add a gadget tool and then HTML, but I'm not sure it's as obvious to add it to the end of each blog post even though it is just as easy. I remember seeing it at the end of people's blog posts and wondering how to do it. It was so simple that when I figured out how to do it I was like duh, obviously that's how it works but just in case you haven't figured it out yet, here is how you do it.

 1. The first thing you do is log in to your Bloglovin' account and click on where it says Bloglovin button.

2. Click on the "Get the icon" to get the unique code to your blog. 

 3. Copy the text that it gives you.

 4. Go to your blogger account and click "New Post". When you have a new post up, write your blog post like you would normally do, and once you are done, click HTML in the top left corner of the screen. This shows you the code for your blog post.

5. Paste the Bloglovin' code at the end of the blog post's HTML.

 6.When you click back on "Compose", which is beside the "HTML" button, you will then see the widget at the end of your blog post. You can use the space and enter keys to move the button to the position you want before you publish your blog post.

7. You have now added a "Follow me on Bloglovin'" button to the end of your blog post so people can easily follow you blog for more posts.

So that is it; I told you it was easy. I hope this helped you if you weren't sure what to do. Also, make sure to read some of the other posts in this series of starting/improving your blog which I will link now.

Creating and Adding a Header

Adding a Background

How to Add a Blog Background (Blogger)

Hey guys! Today I am doing another blog post in my series called starting a blog. If you missed the last post I did, about creating and adding a header to your blog, then click here to see it. This series is for people who aren't very good at the technical/html sort of stuff but still want a really amazing looking blog. So here is how to get a gorgeous background on your Blogger blog:

1. The first thing you are going to do is find a free background that you will be allowed use. Obviously if you are more skilled at html or design then you could design it yourself but here is what you do if you can't. You can Google " free blog backgrounds for Blogger" or you can go straight to this website that I'd recommend called Shabby Blogs. This is the website where I got my background that I love. Side note, I'm not being sponsored in any way by Shabby Blogs to write this, I just think it is a great website. So basically you go into the Shabby Blogs website, click designs and then click backgrounds.

2. Now you can see all of the free backgrounds that Shabby Blogs have to offer. I'd say that there are hundreds of backgrounds on the site, so you will most likely find something that you like. If you don't find something that you like, you can keep looking through Google, or you can pay to get a custom blog design from a site like Wonder Forest.

Examples of Shabby Blog's free backgrounds

3. Once you have chosen your background, the next step is the same, whether you got it on Shabby Blogs, somewhere else, or if you payed for it. (Although some sites will install your background for you for a small fee). So, with the background you have chosen, you will usually see a html code for it somewhere. In Shabby Blogs, you click the "get the code" button like in the picture below. 

4. Now a website like Shabby Blogs will explain everything from there, but if too many words and technical speak confuse you, don't worry, because I'm going to show you how to install it step by step with pictures.

There are different htmls for Blogger or WordPress blogs, but since this is a tutorial on how to install onto blogger, you copy the code that appears under "Blogger Install". If you found your background on any other website like this then you will also have to copy a code like this. 

5. Next you log into your Blogger account and go into the blog that you want to install the background to. Once, you are in the blog, you click layout on the left hand side of the screen just like in the picture below. 

6. Once you are in layout, you then click add a gadget. 

7. When you click add a gadget, another window will open with different options for the gadget that you want to add. Scroll down until you find HTML/JavaScript and click on the + sign to the right of it.

8. The box will then change to where you can add a title and content to your Html/JavaScript. You don't have to add any title when you are installing a background. Paste the code of you background that you copied earlier into the content box and click save.

9. You should now have a gorgeous new background added to your blog :) 

I hope you liked this post! Give it a like on Bloglovin or a +1 on Google Plus if it helped you out. Also, please let me know in the comments below if you would like me to continue this series and show you different ways of how to improve your blog, and let me know what you want to learn next. 

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Quick Update

Hey guys, this is just a little update to let ye know that there won't be a Friday Favourite tomorrow because I am going to Paris for my 21st birthday and will be leaving very early tomorrow morning. Also because of this, I won't have any internet for the weekend so there won't be any posts until at least Monday. Sorry I haven't been posting as regularly as I usually do lately but I've been so busy trying to get everything organised over here (in France) as well as trying to keep up in my classes because they are all in French,which I'm not so good at :P I'm hoping I can sort everything out soon enough, and the posts should be back to normal within the next week or two.
I hope ye can understand x