How To Register a Cheap Blog Domain with Google

Blogger, Google's hosted blogging stage, offers what is probably the cheapest cost of entry into blogging. Free blog hosting, and you can still make cash from the publicity if you organise to find a large sufficient assembly to make it worth while. While that doesn't mean you'll be revolving in millions tomorrow, it means that you're not stuck trying to recoup hosting charges and other charges.

Blogger boasts another professional perk for a reduced cost. You can use them to get a reduced cost custom domain for you blog.

Blogger has permitted custom URLs for quite some time. And as it turns out, listing your URL through Blogger is a bargain. A made-to-order URL with WordPress.com is $12-$24 as of this writing - and they still force you to assist their publicity on it. A custom URL with Blogger is $10, and you don't have to put any ads on your location. If you do put publicity there, they're publicity you earnings from (if you have a allotment of traffic.) 

1. To get started, register a blog at www.blogger.com. 
2. Go to Settings
3. Click on Basic
4. Under Blog Address, you'll see a link marked Buy a domain for your blog.
5. You can enter a domain and select from the drop-down box to choose a different top level domain (.com is the default.)
6. Click Check availability.
7. If the domain you're requesting is available, you can choose a registrar (when I did this, the choices were GoDaddy or eNom).
8. Payment will be made through Google Wallet.

That's it. An easy $10 domain, and it includes Google Apps, so you can give yourself an email account from your custom domain. You could even use this trick if you wanted the domain for a regular website, but you'd have to go back to the registrar and tweak things.

What if You Already Own a Domain?

If you already registered a domain at some other time, you can still point it to your Blogger blog. You won't get a discount on the domain you've already registered, and you won't get the ease of instantly having all the settings pre-configured for Blogger, but you can still get a hosted blog on a server you don't have to maintain or pay a hosting fee to rent.  

Unfortunately, Google's instructions for redirecting the domain are incomplete and rather technical if you're unfamiliar with the back end of a registrar and words like  "A-Records" and "CNAMES" sound like a foreign language.  They have instructions that work for GoDaddy domains, but if you registered that domain with someone else, you'll have to ask your registrar for support.

Going the Other Way- Google Apps Domains

Your hosted Blogger domain gets you Google Apps access, but you can go in the other direction, too. You get the same $10 domain deal when you create a new Google Apps account. Once you've created the account, you can then turn around and use the Google Apps control panel to redirect a page to a Blogger site. In many ways, you might prefer going in this direction for a larger site. You can use Google Sites to form the framework for your website and then a sub-domain (blogs.Wherever My Site Name Is.com) to point to the blog portion. 

If you started from Blogger, not to worry. You can still circle around and set up your Google Apps account later.