So lets begin.
Domain Name
It is highly recommended that you get your own domain name. You must think well about it to be descriptive of what you want to blog about. The domain name should be in the form “myblogname.com”. Since I have a web hosting company I recommend buying a domain name from www.123easysites.eu
Of course any other domain name registration company will be OK for this.
My recommendations for the domain name are:
Hosting
I recommend , you guess it -almost, www.123easysites.com.* Of course you can choose any other company but I recommend my own and not only that I can give you a coupon to get a reduction! You can use the coupon TALESFROMTHEBITS to get 15% off. The coupon is only valid for www.123easysites.com
Install WordPress
After you have your hosting ready you can install WordPress from your hosting control panel using fantastico delux. The whole process of installing WordPress from fantastico takes less than 5 minutes.
Now that the basics are in place the fun starts.
First thinks first you must create a feed for your new blog and you guess it correct you need to go to FeedBurner.
Then, login to Blogger and go to Settings > Site Feed. In the Post Feed Redirect URL box, enter your new FeedBurner address. This will help redirect your subscribers.
Before transferring the post and comments from Blogger you must prepare WordPress. Log to the administration page of your blog and go to Settings > Permalinks. Select “Custom” and add /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html . This is to match the post structure of your Blogger blog.
You are ready for the transfer. Go to Tools>Import and select Blogger from the list. Enter your Blogger login information. This should automatically transfer all your posts and comments for you.
You must change your old feed from FeedBurner so go into the feed and click on “Edit Feed Details.” Change your Original Feed to http://YourNewBlog.com/feed/ .
There are two very important steps and we are done!
You must redirect visitors from your old blog to your new one. To do that go to Blogger, select Settings for the blog you want to transfer. Select Publishing. Click the top link, “Custom domain.” Type in your new domain, www.yournewblog.com. Save. Now your links will transfer automatically to your own domain.
You must do the same for search engines because you do not want to get penalized fro duplicate content. To do that you must go to Blogger Layout>Edit HTML. Place the following code anywhere after <head>: <meta content=’0; url=http://YOURNEWBLOGURL.com/’ http-equiv=’refresh’/> . You can read more about this redirection here.
Now you are done! You have to review your blog to see that every link works OK and that your pictures are transferred correctly. You may need to add some pictures manually.
When I did the transition I found out that the tags that I had for my posts on Blogger became categories in WordPress. I did a manual change to correct this.
Please feel free to contact me if you need help or more information.
Good luck and Happy Blogging!
*Why two hosting addresses? The answer is simple. One is for unlimited hosting but with kernel access restrictions and the other is for limited space and bandwidth hosting but with great add-ons such as Fantastico De Lux, cpanel and many more features.
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