Different profiles for different blogs

Different Blogger Profile using different email addresses

Some bloggers, including me, wants to have different profiles for different blogs. An example is Enviroman Says: An Environmental blog and Blogger Tips and Tricks. In the first case, the profile photo is a meaningful environmental cartoon. In the second case, the profile photo is my real photo, a very rare photo of me laughing away. This can be achieved by using 2 different Blogger accounts, which means having 2 email addresses, which also means more work as you have to be active for the email addresses you created.

In the case of Gmail, their Terms of Service says if your gmail is not active for more than 9 months, it will be deleted, and I suppose your Blogger account together with your blogs will go too as they are all tied together by a Google account.

Yahoo promised email address for live when I created my first Yahoo email address, but you don't see that anymore. I have yet to find out what their new terms are, but I know for a fact your Yahoo mail is deactivated, but not deleted if inactive. It is practically impossible to reach Yahoo for clarifications.

Whatever it is, I would advice against using a Gmail address to create a Blogger account, and not only that, when you are signed into a Blogger account which uses a non-Gmail address, never create a Gmail account as then the new Gmail (Google) account will hijack the Blogger account and you will have to use the new Gmail address to sign into Blogger. I will write more on this later.

Advantage of using different Blogger accounts for different blogs to get different Profiles is that you can use different display names (names that will appear as "Posted by ....." at the bottom of all the posts in all the blogs, so this should be the method you use if that is what you want.

Another advantage is that you can add your lists of interests, favorite movies, favorite music and favorite books to the profiles, and each of them become active links with which you can use to find bloggers with the same interests and favorites, plus there is a chance that your profiles, and thus blogs, may be found by other bloggers doing the same thing. This may help increase traffic to your blogs as described in Increase traffic to your blogs by adding interests and favorites to your profile.

Different Profile using the same Blogger account

If maintaining more than 1 email address is too much work for you, you will have to use a work around like Different profiles for different blogs using the same Blogger account. The disadvantages of this method that at least one profile will not be a standard Blogger profile where you can add interests and favorites to try to increase traffic to your blogs as described in Increase traffic to your blogs by adding interests and favorites to your profile. Further, every posts in EVERY BLOG will have the same display name displayed as "Posted by .....". There is no work around this except perhaps to remove that "Posted by..." in those blog where you don't want your display name to be displayed.

Why I have the same display name in blogs using different Blogger accounts and how to have different display names for different blogs

I have a few Blogger accounts for various (non-sinister) reasons such as wanting a different Profile photo for different blogs, creating a Blogger Beta account when Blogger Beta (now New Blogger) was first introduced, fear of running into the limits for storage, etc. However, I chose to use the same display name for all the blogs. If I want different display name, that is not a difficult task to do. All you have to do is to sign into blogger.com which will take you to the Dashboard. At the top right corner, click on EDIT PROFILE and you can then change your display name to whatever name you want.

Create new blogs with Google Blogger

It is very easy to create a new blog with Google Blogger. All you need to do is to sign into blogger.com (Dashboard) and click "Create a blog" link at the top of the Dashboard, and you will be taken to a page to create a blogspot.com URL:



In the second line, you will notice that the http:// has already been added to the front of the URL and blogspot.com is already added to the back of the URL. All you need to do is to type in something in front of blogspot.com and the URL of your newly created blog will become

http://myblog.blogspot.com

where myblog can be anything you choose. However, preferably use some key words that will help describe the content you intend to put in the blog. This is for SEO (Search Engine Optimization (click BACK button to get back to this page) to help surfers using search engines find your blog more easily. There is a controversy over the use of hyphen ( - ) to separate words and I have not thoroughly research this area yet, but for the moment, I use hyphen for all my URLs. For example, the URL of this blog is

http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com

I actually wanted

http://blogger-tips.blogspot.com

but that has been taken already by others and not available. I would suggest you check the availability of the blog URL you chose by clicking "Check Availability" and if it is not available, you can get creative and try to use alternatives that still have the key words in the blog URL. There are some suggestions in What to do if a blogspot.com URL is not available (click BACK button to get back to this page).

Using important keywords is important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization because the search engines places great importance on the URL of a website.

http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com

and similar blog URLs are sub domain of blogspot.com and belong to Google Blogger, but now with the New Blogger (or just plain Blogger), you can register your own domain and convert your existing blogspot.com blogs to using New Blogger custom domain (click BACK button to get back to this page) and the new domain for your blog will belong to you and not Google Blogger, and many says command more respect from surfers as they say using blogspot.com is like using your house address for business. Potential business partners and customers may look down on the use of home addresses for business.

I have published a post giving reasons why I never use custom domain, but I have changed my mind.

What is more important to me now is the fact that the Google PageRank of a blogspot.com blog like this one belong to Google Blogger and you cannot sell a blogspot.com blog, but you can sell a blog using New Blogger custom domain (click BACK button to get back to this page).

None of my children have indicated any interest in taking over my blogging ventures, and I am in the process of using a custom domain. I can actually convert this blog to use custom domain, but the PageRank of this blog will not transfer to the new domain. Although Blogger will redirect traffic to

http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com

to my newly created domain

http://blogger-tips-tricks.com

if I convert this blog to use the above domain, I am not sure about links to individual post pages (permalinks) of which there are many. I suspect they will become dead links and search engines do not like dead links on a website and may penalize the website for the dead links. I will later conduct a test to confirm this.

I thus have created this new blog Tips and Tricks for Google Blogger which will eventually be using custom domain when I find the time and is confident there will be no problems.

Merge two Blogger account into one

"I think I may have created two google accounts without realizing what I was doing. I see that I now have two 'profile' areas. I want to cancel the account that I opened today, but leave the account open with my same profile that is with my current blog."

This was the question posed by a blogger. Answer is simple. For this task, it is best you use 2 different browsers for the 2 different Blogger account. (This is one of the reasons I have 4 browsers in my computer. It used to be 5 until I got this new computer. To read about my reasons, go to Why you should be using more than 1 browser.) By using 2 browsers, you can be logged into your old Blogger account (and email) in one browser, and into your new Blogger account in another. You will then not need to keep on signing in and signing out to carry out this task.

From the new blog created with the new Blogger account, click LAYOUT in the Dashboard for that blog. In the LAYOUT, click the SETTINGS tab, then the PERMISSION tab:



You will then get to the page which will enable you to "Add Authors":



Click "Add Authors" and in the resulting box, type in the email address you used for the old Blogger account. Then click "Invite".

Check your Inbox in that email address to look for the invitation email, accept the invitation. Go back to your new Blogger account, and in the "Permission tab" you should see a new author (yourself) added. Tick the box to make yourself an administrator, and if you wish, you can then delete your new Blogger account for the new blog, and you will then have the 2 blogs in your old Blogger account and can do all you desire with both blogs. However, err on the side of caution, do not delete yourself until you are sure everything is going fine.

If anything is not clear, just make a comment.