How to Set up Custom Domain Name for Tumblr Blog [Updated]

When you first create a blog on Tumblr, you get a free Tumblr subdomain. But when it comes to professional blogging, you should change some main parts of your blog such as Tumblr theme and free domain Tumblr.

If you’re serious about your blog and want to stand out from the crowd, you should use a custom domain name for your blog. Although Tumblr is a blogging + social networking website, you can make it more special by adding a custom domain to Tumblr.

It will not only increase the Tumblr SEO, but also people will treat your blog as an authority website such as Moz. If you’re wondering why you should use a custom domain name for your Tumblr blog, please read this article to learn what a custom domain name Tumblr is and why you should have one.

How to set up Custom Domain Name for Tumblr – Step By Step Guide

I think now you have a Tumblr blog with a subdomain such as yourcoolblog.tumblr.com. I will show you how to convert it from yourcoolblog.tumblr.com to yourcoolblog.com. You just need to follow these steps correctly and wait a few hours.

To make a custom domain on Tumblr, you have to follow these three main steps:

1. Choose a Custom Domain and buy your desired domain
2. Configure your domain name to work with Tumblr
3. Change Tumblr address to custom domain
4. Optional: Add a new sitemap to webmaster tools and changing the blog address in Google Analytics

Are you ready for setting up your own domain name with Tumblr? So, Let’s start adding a new top level domain to Tumblr blog.

Step #1 Choose a Domain Name for Your Blog

This is the most important step in this tutorial. If you choose a wrong domain for your blog, it will break down your blog and lose the credibility and the authority.

In a previous post, I shared a few free tools to check the domain name availability. You can use them to find a good available top level domain. But I will give you a few tips to find a perfect domain name for your Tumblr blog.

If you want a top level domain for your branded blog:

• Use an easy to spell, enter and share domain name with or without keywords. Ex: labnol.org
• Search on social media, whether that brand is already registered. Ex: For Facebook, you might search for whether there is a fan page with your brand.

If you want a top level domain for your small business blog:

• Use an easy to spell, enter and share domain name with relevant keywords. Ex:problogtricks.com, socialmediaexaminer.com. If your root domain has some keywords, they will help in boosting search engine ranking position for some keywords.
• Analyze main competitors in your industry. If there’s a competition and more opportunities, great. Stick with your niche. You just need to find a way to stand out from your competitors. You can competitor research using SEMrush. Learn more about SEMrush reading this SEMrush review post and get a SEMrush free trial Pro accountover here.
• Try to find an available top level domain for your blog rather than a country specific domain. (If your target audience is not limited to a country/continent)

If you want a top level domain for your niche specific blog:

• Use a keyword rich domain name for your blog. It doesn't matter if you add numbers to your domain. Ex: premiumtumblrthemes2015.com You can find long tail keywords with domain name opportunities with Long Tail Pro keyword research software. UseSEMrush to find keyword difficulties and search volumes of each keywords.

Use these free tools to find an available domain name for your blog. Also, you can find a good domain name through domain name registrars such as Godaddy and using complete niche marketing SEO software such as LongTail Pro platinum. (Learn how to Get a special discount for LongTail Pro platinum tool over here.)

Step #2 configure your domain name to work with Tumblr

Now you have a good domain name for your blog. It’s time to configure it to work with Tumblr.

Note: I explain here how to configure Godaddy domain to work with Tumblr. If you purchased adomain name from Godaddy, you don’t need to worry about these steps. Also, there are not big differences between Godaddy and other domain name registrars. Read below steps carefully and follow its instructions.

#1. Log in to your Godaddy Account Manager using your account username and password.

#2. In the Godaddy Products page, near to Domains, click on Launch.

#3. Now you can see all your purchased domains. Click on the domain you want to use in your Tumblr and then click on the down-arrow button near to the domain. Next select on Manage DNSoption.

#4.  Now you are in the DNS zone. First, you need to add an A (Host) record in the DNS zone. By adding an A (Host) record, you point your domain to the Tumblr host IP. It's like you link your domain to work with Tumblr where your blog is hosted. Simply click on “Add Record” button.

#5. Now you’d see a pop out box named with “Add Zone Record” under your selected domain. Select “A (Host)” under the record type. Then type these values in each text box. Look at below screenshot for an example.

Host: @
Point to: 66.6.44.4
TTL: 1 Hour

After adding necessary values, click on “Finish” button and then "Save" button.

Now you are almost done. But if you want to add a subdomain such as www or blog in front of your domain, you should add another value to your Domain DNS zone.

Follow these steps if you want to add www to your blog domain name. Ex: yourblogname.com to www.yourblogbname.com

#6. In the DNS zone file zone, click on “Add Record” link.

#7. Then select on CNAME (Alias) as the record zone. Under “Host” field, type “www”. In the “point to” text field, enter domains.tumblr.com. Set TLL (Time to Live changes) as 1 hour or 30 minutes. Here are two fields and their values you'll fill up.

Host: www
Point to: domains.tumblr.com

Click on “Finish” button and then save changes button.

I have created a CNAME for new Tumblr blog goto.problogtricks.com. Here’s how i entered the values to Godaddy CNAME.

If you want add another sub-domain (ex: blog.yourwebsite,com) to your root domain, you just need to add another CNAME record pointing Tumblr.

Step #3: Change Tumblr Address for New Custom Domain

Everything is done with your Godaddy account. You have to wait a few minutes till all changes are saved and worked. After a few minutes, follow these instructions to add new Custom domain to Tumblr blog.

#1. Login to your Tumblr account using your username and password.

#2. Go to the settings page of your Tumblr blog. https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/YourTumblrBlogNameHere

#3. Click on Pencil icon under Tumblr URL.

#4. Then activate the “Use a Custom Domain” option.

#5. Enter your new domain name as shown in below screenshot. After entering the new custom domain to Tumblr, to check everything is correct so far, click on the Test domain link.

If you followed every step above correctly as I explained, you’d see a screen similar to below.

If you are getting error messages, I recommend you to wait a few hours to save changes you have done in Godaddy Domains manager.

#6. If you got a successful message like above, then click on “Save” button.

You’re done. Now you set up the custom domain for your Tumblr blog. As you changed the URL structure of your blog, you have to change default settings on webmaster tools and analyzing systems.

Read these articles and follow the steps in these tutorials to set up analyzing services for your blog.

• Submit your Brand New Blog to Search Engines - Follow only if your blog is not yet crawled by search engines.
• Add Your Blog to Google - Follow instructions in this post to add your website to Google webmaster tools and add a new sitemap.
• Add Your Blog to Yahoo and Bing - Find how to add your new blog to Bing search database.
• Add Your Blog to Baidu - step by step tutorial on how to manage your website appearance on Baidu Chinese search engine.
• Add Your Blog to Yandex - Add your website to Yandex search engine and drive traffic to your new domain.
• Set Up Google Analytics for Tumblr - Follow this tutorial, if you didn't set up Google Analytics to track your website visits and user activities.

As you set up custom domain to Tumblr, you might want to learn how to increase the SEO performance of your Tumblr blog. Read this Ultimate guide to Tumblr SEO to boost your organic traffic and optimize your website for both people and search engines. It's the Internet's first Guide for Tumblr SEO. Once you followed the steps in that tutorial, you can see a drastic improvement of your website traffic quickly.

Conclusion

Although Tumblr gives you a free subdomain for your blog, you should use a custom domain for Tumblr. It will not only inspire you to blog like a pro, but also will stand your blog out from other thousands of or millions of blogs out there.

This step by step tutorial showed you how to set up the custom domain in Tumblr. There’s no magic or need special skills to set up the custom domain. But you need to learn how to choose a perfect domain name and how to map your domain name to work with Tumblr.

If you found this post is informative, don't forget to share it with your friends on your favorite social networks.

Note: If you found that custom domain Tumblr not working or want to learn more about how to setup custom domain Tumblr with Godaddy, please use below comment form and let me know your query. I will help you from teaching what's a custom domain on Tumblr to setting up custom domain Tumblr blog for free.

Have any question or suggestion? Share it in the comment form below.

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10 Best Free Online Proofreading Tools to Check Grammar & Spelling Errors Fast

It doesn't matter what your job, position is, if you are not good at writing error free articles, it influences to your job and probably the personality. One of the biggest headaches of bloggers, copywriters and online, offline workers is that making lots of grammar and spelling mistakes and errors.

Yes, writing error free articles is a tough job. But, it doesn't mean that you can not write quality content with less grammar and spelling mistakes. There are lots of ways to checking grammar and spelling. If you don’t editing and proofreading articles, how can you make sure that your article is a grammar and spelling mistakes free one?

There’s no any method, right? So you should spell and grammar check of your content in order to get a good article which builds the trust and credibility. How if one of your articles has misspells which change the core message of the document? You could waste your valuable time and lose a customer or even an existing customer, right? So in today’s post I will show you how to improve your spelling and grammar with proofreading. This is especially applicable to you, if English is not your mother language.

Why You Should proofread your articles?

I am in the blogosphere since 2012 and have written lots of articles and documents. One basic question I got on earlier days is how I can check grammar and spelling errors and mistakes in my documents. I think you should also have this question. In those days, I used to proofread manuscripts and online document myself without anyone’s help.

But what happened? I found hundreds of spelling errors, grammar mistakes and also a few changes which harm the core message of articles. Every time I proofread any blog post, I found lots of errors myself. The number of grammatical errors reduces in every day as my English knowledge start improving as I write/update blog posts every day. That’s when I engaged to find a good method to proofread articles and blog posts. In that period, I found a few best ways to proofread and check my grammar. For checking grammar and spelling, we can use below four methods. They are,

1. Proofread Yourself: One of the most used method to checking grammatical errors and finding misspells. But many people don’t use this method properly, so they end up with having lots of grammar and spelling errors in the article. I will later explain you how to properly proofread an article to fix spelling and grammatical mistakes.
2. Hire a Freelancer: Probably the best method to proofread a document. But, it is not a cheap proofreading method as some proofreading services charge from $50 to $1000 or even more than that for grammar and spell check. If you have lots of articles to check their correctness and relevancy, so this is not the best method you must go with as they could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. To your notice, you can hire a professional proofreader from Elance and oDesk. Also, there are lots of proofreading websites online. You can search on Google to find a few of them. Many of those sites have professional proofreaders who have a good knowledge about their languages.
3. Use Online Proofreading tools: This is easiest and the cheapest way to check a document’s grammar and spelling mistakes. There are lots of Online Proofreading Tools. You just need to pick up one of those and start uploading your document to the website. After a few seconds online proofreading tool will start analyzing your article to find spell, grammatical and punctuation errors. Many of those tools will suggest treatments for those errors. You can choose what letters, words and grammar suggestions are too good and go up with them.
4. Use an Offline Proofreading Software: There lots of auto grammar and sentence correction software for windows and Mac. Not only that you can find a few grammar checking apps for your Android and iPhone. These offline proof reading softwares have a database which includes millions of words and hundreds of grammatical rules. As many languages use to change and could include lots of new words in every day, using offline software to proofread is not a too good choice. 

I followed all of the above methods, despite hiring a freelance proofreader to check grammar and spelling mistakes of my blog posts. At the end of test what I found is that online grammar checker tools/proofreading tools could save lots of time from my life. Many of my articles here at ProBlogTricks exceed 2000 word count. To name a few, SEMRUSH review, Long Tail Pro review,Tumblr SEO strategies and Best SEO Tools (and the one you are reading)have lots of words and sentences. So I wanted to check my sentence for grammar errors free. I know that error-free blog posts increase the credibility of ProBlogTricks brand and also build the trust.

In fact, English grammar matter in marketing and conversions. If no one can understand the message that you want to imply, will anyone buy your products? Not anyone, right? Also Bing already uses Grammar quality as a metric to rank web pages on SERPs. So you should improve your writing skills in English in order to drive lots of traffic from US and other countries.

As I said, I have used many online proofreading tools. Many of them are free proofreaders while others are premium or paid proofreading tools, but premium ones have robust features that actually make your error-full article a complete, quality article which anyone can read and understand. So use these online grammar checker tools (proofreaders) to fix your article errors fast.

Best FREE Online Proofreading Tools to Improve your spelling and grammar

So here are the best online proofreading tools (grammar and spelling checker software) which will surely improve your article quality while polishing your English knowledge. Trust me; they helped me improve my English knowledge. Feel free to use these tools free and if you know any other proofreading tool, let us know in the comment section below. I would like to know them and will add them to this best online proofreading tools list.

#1. Ginger – A Grammar & Spelling Check Software

Ginger is one of my favorite proofreading tools which makes it really easy to check grammar and spelling errors in Microsoft word, PowerPoint, Outlook, in the web and also in Gmail. I am using Ginger grammar and spelling checking software for 2 years and I didn't find any software error on it. It worked perfectly until today, so I hope will it tomorrow too!

Here are a few features of the Ginger grammar check software.

• Grammar Checker: As a writer, I do lots of grammar mistakes. I am not a 100% error-free article writer, but I know I should prevent them as much as I can. Some errors I can find easily while a few of them I can’t. But with the use of Ginger software, I am able to find grammar mistakes and start fixing them. As my mother-language is not English, I am not familiar with lots of complex grammar rules and also complicated words. But, Ginger understands those grammar rules and weird words on documents. Therefore Ginger Grammar checker feature helps me a lot to fix those grammar mistakes that I can’t find easily. Ex: I had been played cricket with my friends. >> I had been playingcricket with my friends.
• Sentence Rephraser: When we type lots of words, we could lose our perception and be disgusted with typing more words. That results in having lots of spelling errors. But, with Sentence Rephraser tool in Ginger software, you can find different and better ways of writing your original article. It will not only improve your article, but also your writing skills too.
• Text to Speech: This is a premium feature of Ginger proofreader. If you want to learn English and polish your English knowledge, how to speak English with the proper accent, you should try Text to Speech tool. There are a few settings on Text to Speech tool such as choosing US or UK pronounce voices, change voice from men to women etc.
• Spell Checker: Ginger Spell Checker tool is one of best spell checker tools online. As I have used it, I know how it helped me improve my writings. As you write more, the more chances there could be to include misspelled words. Ginger has a good technology to find those misspell and misused words so fast. That’s a huge reason why I use this grammar checker tool for a while.
• Translate: Ginger currently supports more than 40 languages. If you want to translate your English article to Spanish or French document to Greek, you can easily do it with Ginger Translate tool. If you hire a freelance translator do the same work, it could cost you hundreds of dollars per article. But with Ginger software, it’s free.
• Personal Trainer: My favorite tool in Ginger Grammar & Spell checker software is the Personal Trainer. As I am not a well-English conscious person, I always prefer to learn new grammar rules, techniques and synonyms. With the Ginger Personal Trainer tool, you can learn English yourself. I found this is the most valuable tool for me.

Ginger is not just an online proofreader or free grammar checker tool for English language. It has lots of versatile tools which can help you widely for improving your English knowledge and creating error-free articles. Another thing that I like in Gingersoftware is that it works more efficiently than other online proofreaders and grammar checker tools. It’s one of the most - wanted feature by many of the writers. Thankfully, it saved lots of hours of my life. Do you want an efficient grammar spell checker tool for free? So use Ginger software.

Click Here to Download Ginger Grammar and Spell Check Software

#2. Grammarly - Plagiarism Checker & Online Proofreader

Grammarly is another online free proofreader + plagiarism checker tool. It has a browser extension which facilitates you to check grammar and spelling mistakes on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn anywhere on the web.

As its convenience and robust tools, more than 4,000,000 students, marketers, bloggers and freelancers use Grammarly tools to edit their documents online. It offers both free and paid services. Features such as Vocabulary Enhancement and Plagiarism checker are premium services while many of others are free of cost.

Here are a few important features and tools in Grammarly Online Proofreader:

• Works On anywhere, any device: As Grammarly is an online proofreader, you can use your Grammarly account anywhere you are. You just need to sign up to Grammarly for free over here and then start writing your article or upload an existing one if you have. Grammarly will save your documents on their servers, so you can edit them later.
  
• Grammar check Microsoft Word: Do you want to check grammatical errors in your MS word document? So download the Grammarly Add-on for Microsoft office and start checking grammar and spelling mistakes free online.
  
• Check for Website Plagiarism: If you are a blogger like me, you should also have the plagiarism issue. The more your articles are grammar and spelling errors-free means more people will find it useful. So more content-thieves will start copying and pasting your precious content on their websites. The worst thing happens when their website outranks your post (original one). So with the help of Grammarly Plagiarism checker tool, you can find content thieves very easily. Probably the best online grammar and plagiarism checker tool out there.
  
• Vocabulary Enhancement: Another favorite feature of me in Grammarly tool. The easiest way to stay away from the keyword stuffing issue is using synonyms in blog posts. It is also applicable to long tail keywords. With Grammarly, you can find synonyms and put them on your articles without doing any damage to article forimproving the potential for ranking for more keywords. 

Overall Grammarly is one of best Plagiarism checker + online proofreader tools. I recommend you to use Grammarly for your proofreading aspects.

#3. PolishMyWriting: Try After the Deadline

PolishMyWriting is another free proof reading website which will automatically show grammatical and spelling errors in your article. If you have an essay or a blog post, you can copy and paste paragraphs into the text box on polishmywriting.com website and start checking writing skills.

All the spelling errors will be highlighted by red color while grammar suggestions will be colored with green color. Polishmywriting will provide writing suggestions (as your writing style) by theblue color. Overall Polishmywriting is an easy to use, useful online free writing checker tool.

Apart from showing spelling and grammatical mistakes on your writing, polishmywriting will also help in providing active and passive voice suggestions. For blog posts, you should mostly use active voice as it builds a conversation between you and the reader. But, for essays, notes, official letters and documents, there is no limit. By increasing the number of active voice sentences, you can easily convert the reader into a subscriber or a buyer. You can use PolishMyWriting to check whether your blog post has more passive voice sentences rather than active voice sentences.

Polishmywrting is a good English grammar checker tool to find writing mistakes of your essays and blog posts. Click here to check out PolishMyWriting website to check your article writing quality.

#4. SlickWrite

Even through SlickWrite doesn't have powerful tools such as plagiarism checker like in Grammarly, it has a few useful features such as checking the passive voice index, Automated Readability Index, Estimated reading time and Average paragraph length. If you want a useful tool to check your article quality and readability score while checking the grammar and spelling flaws, you might go up with SlickWrite.com.

Not all your writing mistakes will be recovered with SlickWrite tool, but it will surely improve the readability score of your blog. As Google uses readability score as a result filtering metric, you shouldn't ignore the serviceableness of SlickWrite.

Click Here to Go to SlickWrite.com

#5. Paper Rater: Online Proofreader - Pre Grade Your Paper

This is another free online proofreading tool which checks grammar, spelling and word voice. Once you have uploaded your text into PaperRater and choose the option settings, you can start analyzing your article. The speed of analyzing the document for punctuation, spelling and grammar errors will be decided as the content length. However, your manuscript will be analyzed immediately in real-time.

Apart from analyzing an article for checking content quality, PaperRater will show a final overall wring score based on your writing skills. Click here to find out your writing score from the PaperRater online proofreading tool.

#6. SpellChecker – Spell Check Solutions

WebSpellchecker.net provides a few great tools to check spelling and grammar qualities of your articles. One of those products is SpellChecker.net. It analyses your article and check grammar mistakes and also find synonyms.

If you want to find the ways to get synonyms for words in your article, you just need to go to spellchecker.net and paste your article and click on the “Spell Check” button. In the pop-up window (enable popups for spell checking website, else you won’t be able to use this free spell checker tool), you could see two tabs: Grammar and Thesaurus. Click the Thesaurus tab and start generating synonyms for each word of your article.

Even through Spellchecker is not a complete online proofreader, it can suggest synonyms for words in your articles. And its Grammar checker tool can scan your web document well and suggest recommendations for grammatical errors.

#7. Reverso Spell Checker: An Intelligent speller and grammar checker

Reverso Spell Checker is particularly a special proof reading tool for checking English spelling and grammar errors. Just like in the Spell Checker tool, in Reverso English grammar, spelling tool, you can find synonyms for each word on your article. It also suggests important changes/recommendations for your article such as removing words/text, adding new words, punctuation etc.

As the example below, Reverso spell checker tool suggests to replace cannot with can’t. It is a really awesome tool, right? A good tool to check English spelling and grammar. Check it now clicking this link.

#8. GramMark.org - Grammar Checker and Writing Style

GramMark is an open source writing aide that you can download over here. It’s a completely free proofreader and you can use GramMark free online grammar checker tool over here or download the source code from GitHub and modify it as you want.

GramMark grammar checker tool analyses your document and provides an in-depth insight about it. I found this is a perfect online proofreading tool for all bloggers, students and content writers alike. After you edited the content, you can download a revised copy which will be in .doc format (Open with your word processing program such as Microsoft Word or edit with Google Docs).

Overall, GramMark is a everyone-should-use free online proofreader tool, just not only because it perfectly corrects grammar mistakes, but also you can edit the source code and develop a custom grammar checker tool. Awesome, right?

#9. Language Tool: A Multilingual Open Source Proofreading Software

This is another free online grammar checker tool which supports more than 20 languages, including French, German, Polish, Russian and Greek. If you are looking for free proofreading software for your computer (Windows & Mac) or LibreOffice and Open Office package (Linux, Unix etc.), then LanguageTool fits best for you.

The best thing about LanguageTool proofreader is that, you can edit the program source code and change the software preferences as your desire. LanguageTool is available under the licence of LGPL 2.1 or later. Click Here to download its source code over Github and click here to use LanguageTool proof reading tool online free.

#10. Online Text Correction

Online Text correction is a simple online proofreader I found on the Internet. Simply, you just need to put in your article copy to text box and click on “Check Text” button. Within a few seconds, OnlineCorrection will highlight spelling and grammar errors. Spelling suggestions are highlighted by red color and grammar suggestions are highlighted by green color.

Once you move the mouse pointer over the marked words, you can see suggestions. See below screenshot.

Although Online Text Correction doesn't have enough powerful tools, it’s a simple online grammar checker tool that highlights errors and provides suggestions. Click Here to visit Online Text Correction.

How to proofread your Article/Blog Post? Best Tips to Remember…

I think now you have picked up a good proofreading tool/service. The next step is follow astrategic and proven way to proofread your article. Not every time is suitable to proofread articles. Here are some tips to create an error-free article.

• First write your article. Don’t check for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes at first. You can find them on later.
• After you wrote over the article, get an interval yourself. I usually take one hour or so interval as it releases the tiredness and help me feel better.
• After several hours, you can start proofreading the article manually. Check for contextual and writing style errors.  After you finished proofreading, upload article to your desired online proofreader or use the grammar checking add-on, if you use Gingeror Grammarly.
• Don’t approve every suggestion they provide. Remember these online tools and proofreading software work as algorithms command. So some words and tenses could be correct, even proofreaders show them as errors. E. I: Many proofreader programs find that "Pro Blog Tricks" is a plural noun. But, it’s a singular word.
• After wisely proofread the article using a grammar and spelling checker tool, recheck article again manually to make sure there aren't any mistakenly missed or added word.

Many bloggers suggest to write the post in a single day and proofread blog post in the next day. Then publish the blog post in the latter day. I too suggest this method as more time you dedicate to write a post, it will become a quality post that search engines and people like most.

Conclusion

Proofreading is the final stage of the editing process. Content is important a lot, but the way you present it significantly affect the way people judge it (and the way they judge you). If your blog post or article filled up with lots of weird characters, unknown words and grammatical mistakes, people won’t understand the core message you want to let them know.

As search engines started using grammar and spelling qualities as ranking factors and they matter a lot in conversion rate optimization, you shouldn't ignore the importance of having quality and error free articles on your website.

This will not only help in increasing search traffic so fast, but also build the trust between you and readers and increase the credibility of your brand. Neil Patel, the co-founder of KISSmetrics and the owner of QuickSprout hires professional proofreaders to check grammar and spelling errors in his articles. But, you shouldn't hire proofreaders to check grammatical errors of your articles.

With the help of these free online Proofreading tools, you can create error-free articles very easily. But, you shouldn't always go with the suggestions they provide as some of them could be incorrect.

So what’s your favorite online proofreading tool? Do you believe that proof reading tools always provide correct suggestions? Share your thoughts in the below comment form.

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