Instantly Create an eCommerce Website With Google Blogger

It had been written by me previously that blogging is a business and still it is big a business whether for business or pleasure, blogging can be a lucrative and fruitful way of spending time on the web. Adding fresh content, adding your company voice to a subject or topic can propel your business and website from relative obscurity to overnight viral success. Blogging is something that many people enjoy and for a business, it is an essential channel for keeping in touch with customers.

Instantly Create an eCommerce Website With Google Blogger

It is also possible to monetise your blog through a number of avenues, including advertising and eCommerce shops. This article will help you set up a blog on Blogger and help you monetise it.

What is Google Blogger?

Blogger is Google’s popular, free online blogging platform used many people to increase their online presence, from writing about to hobbies and interests to creating budding eCommerce empires.

Blogger was developed by Pyra Labs but bought in 2003 by Google. Since then, the free blogging tool has become an integral part of Google’s platform, with posts being published to BlogSpot. It is used by businesses across all industries and sectors to get their blogged material in front of fans, followers and customers.

If you have not used Google’s Blogger tool yet, you may be surprised at what it can offer your business, as well as a profitable sideline with Google Adsense too.

Getting started on Google Blogger

From keeping family and friends updated about your life, to starting your own advice column, discussing the latest politics or to satisfying your lust for a particular topic or subject, a blog is one way of doing it.

For a business, it is also a way for them to share knowledge and information about their products and services, garnering interest and generating sales, as well as showing their thought leadership on their industry through posts. Regular posting can also increase their search engine rankings.

Blogger offers many features and functions, making it a great platform for most businesses. It is also possible to host more than one blog if you feel you want to separate subjects or topics, or have multiple contributors. Bearing in mind it is a free to use platform, many bloggers feel that it offers far more than some of the blogging platforms that users pay for.

To set up a Google Blogger Blog, just follow these three easy steps:

Step 1 – Create an account

If you have a Gmail email account, this is more or less done for you. It is a simple case of connecting your current G+ profile with blogger. If you do not have a Gmail account, the steps are simple and straightforward – Input your name, a connected email address and a password.

Step 2 – Name your blog

You can assign your blog any name at all. You can also create other blogs and have them linked to one account. You can have a separate business and personal blogs, but have them all in one convenient place.

Step 3 – Choose a template

You may feel the number of templates options is limited but, as you blog grows, you'll more than likely realise that simplicity is no barrier to grabbing a broad audience. However, the one factor that many people enjoy about Blogger is that despite its simplicity, it still has an impact online - unusual in today's crowded web space.

Posting on Google Blogger

Once you have completed the above three steps you can begin posting. Blogger uses a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get). On one hand, you may have been expecting something more complex but for many people, this simple approach works well. You create the post, format it and post it.

If you feel you need more formatting options, you can use Google Docs to post to your Blogger account, using advanced editing with HTML.

You can also configure your Blogger with a secret email address so that you can email completed blog posts to your blog. If you are not always at your desk, you can make quick updates and so on via your smartphone or tablet too.

It may be simple, but Blogger boasts a range of features:

Pictures and graphics – You can upload photos from your desktop to your blog, choose a basic layout for them, and easily select the perfect size.

Video – Adding YouTube clips is also a possibility, and it's quite straightforward to embed these in.

There are lots of new features being added all the time, such as being able to directly load photos from your mobile too - despite being free to use, it's constantly evolving.

Making money with Google Blogger

As mentioned previously, blogging can provide a good way to sell your products without the expense and maintenance required by a full ecommerce website. If you want to create a standout ecommerce site with Google Blogger, we recommend taking the following steps:

Find the right template

Blogger offers hundreds of templates, so once you feel more comfortable you should explore those available and try to find one that evokes the right look and feel for your eCommerce store.

Describe your products

More than likely this will be your first blog post – a description of your products, including photos. You can even embed a YouTube video if you wish. You may need to update these listings with new posts from time to time, or you may want to add a permalink to the post on your blog’s header menu.

Integrate PayPal

PayPal is one of the world’s most widely used payment systems and so you are missing out on an uncountable amount of business if it is not integrated with your eCommerce Blogger site.

It is actually very straightforward to integrate PayPal into Google Blogger. Once you have signed in to your PayPal account, you need to navigate to My Selling Tools – Selling Online – Update – Selling Preferences – Create New Button. This will create the HTML code required, and you can then simply copy and paste the code into your web page.

Make use of Google AdSense

Although Blogger is not the only platform to offer this, there is a possibility of creating income from your blog with the use of Google AdSense ads. The amount you earn depends on your subject matter as well as the popularity of your blog. Clearly, creating a blog that has frequent visitors, with fresh content posted regularly will make an impact on how much earning potential the blog has.

With your Blogger account, you will see a link to AdSense. You are not automatically subscribed – you can avoid the adverts if you like.

The ads appear down the side of your blog, or in another prominent place depending on your template. That said, they do not obscure or impinge on your content.

Creating and placing AdSense adverts is not complex, and with varying degrees of success, it can be a simple way of creating some very appealing extra revenue. There are examples of popular blogs that make around $500 a month from AdSense adverts. Or, you may be happy with a few extra pounds here and there!

Promote, promote, promote!

As you have set up your free ecommerce site using Google Blogger, what better way to promote your products than with free social media networking sites? Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ can all play a part in your online success, and regular exposure of products on these sites may also help you move up the search engine rankings.

Final Summary

If you want to blog for revenue, there are other ways of making better money, and faster, such as buying your own web space and customising adverts that way. If, however, you are looking for a simple, effective blogging platform that could bring you and your business much-needed exposure, then Blogger could be perfect for you.

Next Steps

If you’re looking to start up an eCommerce blog then why not talk to one of Expert Market’s approved suppliers. By putting your info in the form at the top of the page, we can match you with the companies best able to meet your needs. Here I can help you in this issue either free or premium. Get in touch.

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Instant Fixing the Error Establishing a Database Connection in WordPress

If you have been surfing the web for a while, you have at least seen this error a few times. Error Establishing a Database Connection is one of those curses that could be caused by many reasons. As a WordPress beginner, this could be awfully frustrating specially when it happened on its own without you changing anything. We ran into this issue yesterday on our own site. It took a little over 20 minutes to detect and fix the problem. While doing the research to find possible causes, we realized that there was no good article that covered everything. In this article, we will show you how to fix the error establishing a database connection in WordPress by compiling a list of solutions all in one place.

Note: Before you make any database changes, make sure you have sufficient backups.

Why do you get this error?

Well in short, you are getting this error because WordPress is unable to establish a database connection. Now the reason why WordPress is unable to establish a database connection can vary. It could be that your database login credentials are wrong or have been changed. It could be that your database server is unresponsive. It could be that your database has been corrupted. In our experience, majority of the times this error happens because of some sort of server error however there could be other factors as well. Lets take a look at how to go about troubleshooting this problem.

Does the problem occur for /wp-admin/ as well?

First thing you should do is to make sure that you are getting the same error on both the front-end of the site, and the back-end of the site (wp-admin). If the error message is the same on both pages “Error establishing a database connection”, then proceed onto the next step. If you are getting a different error on the wp-admin for instance something like “One or more database tables are unavailable. The database may need to be repaired”, then you need to repair your database.

You can do this by adding the following line in your wp-config.php file. Add it just before ‘That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging’ line wp-config.php.

1	define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);

Once you have done that, you can see the settings by visiting this page: http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php

Remember, the user does not need to be logged in to access this functionality when this define is set. This is because its main intent is to repair a corrupted database, Users can often not login when the database is corrupt. So once you are done repairing and optimizing your database, make sure to remove this from your wp-config.php.

If this repair did not fix the problem, or you are having trouble running the repair then continue reading this article as you might find another solution to work.

Checking the WP-Config file

WP-Config.php is probably the single most important file in your entire WordPress installation. This is where you specify the details for WordPress to connect your database. If you changed your root password, or the database user password, then you will need to change this file as well. First thing you should always check is if everything in your wp-config.php file is the same.

1	define('DB_NAME', 'database-name');

2	define('DB_USER', 'database-username');

3	define('DB_PASSWORD', 'database-password');

4	define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

Remember your DB_Host value might not always be localhost. Depending on the host, it will be different. For popular hosts like HostGator, BlueHost, Site5, it is localhost. You can find other host values here.

Some folks suggested that they fixed their problem by replacing localhost with the IP. It is common to see this sort of issue when running WordPress on a local server environment. For example on MAMP, the DB_Host value when changed to the IP may seem to work.

1	define('DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1:8889');

IP’s will vary for online web hosting services.

If everything in this file is correct (make sure you check for typos), then it is fair to say that there is something wrong on the server end.

Check your Web Host (MySQL Server)

Often you will notice this Error establishing database connection when your site gets swarmed with a lot of traffic. Basically, your host server just cannot handle the load (specially when you are on shared hosting). Your site will get really slow and for some users even output the error. So the best thing you should do is get on the phone or livechat with your hosting provider and ask them if your MySQL server is responsive.

For those users who want to test if MySQL server is running yourself, you can do a few things. Test other sites on the same server to see if they are having the issue. If they are also getting the same error, then most definitely there is something wrong with your MySQL server. If you do not have any other site on this same hosting account simply go to your cPanel and try to access phpMyAdmin and connect the database. If you can connect, then we need to verify if your database user has sufficient permission. Create a new file called testconnection.php and paste the following code in it:

1

<?php

2	$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'root', 'password');

3	if (!$link) {

4	die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());

5

}

6	echo 'Connected successfully';

7	mysql_close($link);

8

?>

Make sure to replace the username and password. If the connected successfully, then it means that your user has sufficient permission, and there is something else that is wrong. Go back to your wp-config file to make sure that everything there is correct (re-scan for typos).

If you cannot connect to the database by going to phpMyAdmin, then you know it is something with your server. It does not necessarily means that your MySQL server is down. It could mean that your user does not have sufficient permission.

In our case, our MySQL server was running. All other sites on the servers were working fine except for WPBeginner. When we tried going to our phpMyAdmin, we ended up getting the error:

#1045 – Access denied for user ‘foo’@’%’ (using password: YES)

We got on the phone with HostGator and their support quickly found the problem. Somehow our user’s permissions were reset. Not sure how that happened, but apparently that was the reason. They went back in and restore the permissions and we were able to get the site back live.

So if you get the access denied error in either connecting to your phpMyAdmin or through test connection.php results, then you should contact your host right away to get them to fix it.

Solutions that Worked for Others

It is important to note, that these may not work for you. Use at your own risk and make sure that you have sufficient backups if anything goes wrong.

Deepak Mittal said that his client was getting the error that database needs to be repaired. Even after repairing the database, the error did not go away. He tried various things and at the end, the issue was the site url. Apparently that was changed which caused the error to persist. He ran the SQL query by going to phpMyAdmin:

1	UPDATE wp_options SET option_value='YOUR_SITE_URL' WHERE option_name='siteurl'

Make sure to replace YOUR_SITE_URL with the actual url example: http://www.wpbeginner.com. The wp_options will be different if you have changed the default WordPress database prefix.

This seemed to fix the issue for him and few others that commented on his post as well.

Sachinum suggested that he was able to connect the database with testconnection.php, so he changed the wp-config.php user to the root user. WordPress started to work perfectly fine. Then he reverted the settings back to the database-user, and it continued to work. He could not figure out what was wrong, but concluded that it was a typo.

Cutewonders suggested that they removed the content of active_plugins in wp_options table and edited the contents of recently_edited. Basically that seemed to fix the problem. 

We read on numerous sources that users simply uploaded a fresh copy of WordPress and it fixed the error.

This is a really frustrating error. What have you tried that seemed to work for you? We would be happy to expand on this resource, so others do not have to waste as much time finding a solution.

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