Blogger To Wordpress Migration: Diary 1

The diary of a tech idiot, migrating a Blogger blog to a self-hosting Wordpress site.

I’ve spent 5 years writing online and the most I’ve made in one month is £50.00. This did not even come from my blogs, but rather from a site I used to write articles for. I decided that since I was spending all this time writing online, it was only just that I started to make some decent money from all my hard work.

I delved into finding out how folks all over the Internet were making thousands every month. What did they have that I didn’t? I started studying the work they were putting out. I realised they knew way more than I did where technical Internet stuff was concerned, but I was more knowledgeable about writing and research than some of them were.

I concluded therefore, that since they were actually making money from the materials they wrote, I could do the same regardless of my lack of technical knowledge. I reasoned we were both deficient in one of the two things which made them successful online.

Why the Wordpress hosting decision was made

I figured if they were making thousands, I could make £200.00. This was all I wanted, just £200.00. All over the web, I searched and asked, searched and asked. The common thread running through all the answers I got was, Blogger can’t make you a successful online business. It has to be a self-hosted site, using a Wordpress theme. Blogger, they said, was free (even the .com sites you pay for) and no one takes your online business seriously when they land on your Blogger blog. (Personally, I wouldn't know how to tell which host you use if I landed on your blog - but that's just me. Did I say I was a tech idiot?)

Leaving Blogger - not an easy (cheap) decision

My searches had revealed that such a site (self-hosted, Wordpress) would cost over $100.00, and this was before doing anything, downloading any widgets or plugins, getting help, the lot. Since I hadn’t made the money online, justifying spending this much was difficult. However,  if I wanted to make the money, I had to spend this much and more – catch 22, some may say.

The Blogger to Wordpress (expensive) experiment

I decided I was going to do it, but instead of doing the research to start a completely new blog, I was going to sacrifice my newest Blogger blog and migrate that to Wordpress. This tech idiot was going to bite the bullet. I’d done a lot of research into the blog's name, description, search engine results, competition etc. and I wanted to save myself some time. After all, this blog was only 5 months old, and had only accumulated 42 fabulously wonderful articles (all written by moi) J.

Boy, was this the wrong decision - and not only because I was going to lose my Google ranking! But of course, I couldn’t know this when I started, could I. (I did know about the ranking part). I was in for a whole lot of head spinning and hair pulling. A tech idiot should never, ever migrate a blog. I’ll tell you what happened and how my blog was formed in the next article. It may very well set your head spinning too.

In my next Blogger to Wordpress migration diary I'll tell you how the process went and what had to be done to get the site hosting. I'll share the, 'Oh, what have I done?'  moments and show you why I was almost pulling my hair out. Please share this article if you know anyone who's planning on a migration. My experience will no doubt, help them have an easier time than I did. 
...Oh, almost forgot. I'll show you the site in question next time we speak. The second part of the wordpress migration article is here.  Also see our How Do I Blog page for some more helpful blogging tutorials.


Here are some books to help you on your way.