A Blogger blog enables any Google account holder to share their interests with like-minded audiences on personalized blogs. Blogger doesn’t just limit users to text post; you can also automatically upload and embed a variety of multimedia file sizes in your blog posts, including images and videos. However, if you want to post links to other kinds of files, such as PDFs, spreadsheets or sound files, you can’t upload them directly to the Blogger servers. Fortunately, there are a few workarounds and other methods that allow you to post links to whatever kinds of files you want in your Blogger posts.
What Kinds of Files Can You Upload to Blogger?
Before we get into a discussion about what kinds of files you can’t upload directly to Blogger, it might be useful to specify what kinds of files you can, because this information is hidden pretty far into the Blogger FAQs and help files. As of this writing, the Blogspot dashboard accepts only GIF, JPG, PNG or BMP formats for still images, which can be no larger than 8MB in file size. Compatible video formats include MPEG, QuickTime, AVI, Real and Windows Media file formats, with files no larger than 100MB. Anything else, you can’t upload directly to the Blogger servers. If you try, you’ll get an error message in your file-upload dashboard.
Method 1: Uploading to Your Own External Server
If you have FTP access to your own Web host for another website, use an FTP client such as FileZilla or CuteFTP to upload the file somewhere to your site’s server so that you can link to it as an external file in Blogger. After you’ve uploaded it to your external server, locate the URL of your uploaded file. This will depend on what directory you’ve uploaded it to. For example, if you upload a Microsoft Office document file to the main directory of your site, the direct URL to the file on your server will be yourdomain.com/yourfile.doc, with “yourfile.doc” being the name and file extension of your file. Make note of this direct URL, as you’ll need it for later.
Method 2: Uploading to a File-Hosting Service
You can also post links to your files on your Blogger blog by uploading the file to a free file-hosting service such as 4shared.com, rapidshare.com or mediafire.com. Follow the on-screen instructions on the homepage for uploading your file. When you’ve successfully uploaded the file, the file-hosting service automatically generates a direct link to your uploaded file. Copy this link to your computer’s clipboard.
Posting An Externally Hosted File to Blogger
With either of these first two methods, once you acquire the direct URL to your uploaded file, you must create a hyperlink to the file in your Blogger post.
Visit blogger.com and, if necessary, log in to the Google account associated with your Blogger site.
Click the “New Post” button in the Blogger dashboard next to the blog on which you want to post your file. If you’d like to add a link to the file to an existing post, click “Edit Posts” in your Blogger dashboard, then click “Edit” next to the file you want to edit.
Type the words you want to link to your file, such as the file name or file description, into the posting form.
Highlight the words with your mouse.
Click the hyperlink button — the image of a globe with a chain-link at the top of the posting form — then paste the URL to your file into the pop-up dialogue box that appears.
Click “OK,” then click the orange “Publish Post” button at the bottom of the form to make the changes live on your blog.
Method 3: File Conversion
There is another method you can use to upload a non-compatible file directly to Blogger’s servers: file conversion. While this may not work with every type of file, some non-compatible file formats can be converted to formats that Blogger does accept.
Many non-compatible sound and video types can be converted to MPEG, Windows Media and AVI files by using Any Video Converter, a free video conversion software. You can also convert video files to Real format by using the free Real Player Video Converter. You can also convert PDFs to JPG format for uploading to Blogger, as well, using the free online file converter PDFtoJPG or a similar service. You can also convert non-compatible image file types to JPG or GIF by using the free Online Image Converter from CoolUtils.
Once you’ve converted your file to a compatible format, you can simply upload it to your Blogger server as you normally would.