Client Success Story: The Mom-Tini Lounge

Apr 28, 2008
7 Comments

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Amy Smith wanted her original site, The Business of Motherhood to have a blog. Like many people, Amy created the Mom-Tini Lounge blog on WordPress.com. But suddenly, the limits and restrictions of the free blog hosting service were far too constrictive for what she wanted to do with the growing motherhood blog.

In what is fast becoming a typical blog consulting scenario, Amy needed to move a blog from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress installation. Exporting the posts and other data from the WordPress.com blog and importing them into the self-hosted blog was no problem. Other advantages Amy now enjoys:

  • Custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets — creates the visual appearance of a web design) that really helps create the look and feel to carry the Mom-Tini brand. On WordPress.com, you get no custom CSS unless you want to pay extra for it, and then you have to know how to edit it or pay someone to edit for you anyway.
  • The ability to have more highly customized sidebars. WordPress.com disallows the use of JavaScript in its blogs, which means that a lot of the widgety goodness others are using on their sites is blocked for you at WordPress.com. Self-hosted blogs can do whatever they want. Amy now has freedom and complete control over her blog.
  • It’s her site that’s getting the traffic and the Google search “juice”, not WordPress.com. Her online presence no longer has a split personality.

Here is what Amy has to say about her experience in working with me:

Michael Martine puts the “remarkable” into blogging in so many ways. As a PR person who is new to the blogosphere with a personal venture, I knew a ton about marketing, writing, editing, business & research, but was really restrained by technical hurdles. So many of the new Internet gifts are “free” to use, but have zero technical support, and for a low-tech person, it’s extremely time-consuming and frustrating to search FAQ’s & forums without ever getting to the right answer.

Michael was an amazing, “remarkable (!)” short-cut, not only making new tools & resources available, but quickly handling the back-end technical part for me, and then explaining in a very simple way, how I could start to drive these things as well. He has a keen business sense, and has combined valuable consulting, excellent communication skills, and a very approachable personality, to create a fantastic go-to option for anyone looking to create or extend their web business.

If you’re interested in learning more about what a blog consultant can do to help your blog succeed, please check out my blog consulting services page to learn more or contact me. If you’ve never been here before and you want to wait and see what kind of guy I am first, I invite you to subscribe to Remarkablogger and hang out for a while so you can get to know me (you’ll seem more client success stories, that’s for sure).

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  • @Chris - There are plugins and other methods to get video to "play nice." The layout issue you're describing might have been caused by placing something too wide for a column. Like that video! ;)
  • Michael, we just installed a WordPress blog on our domain and two things 1) it was a pain to figure out how to add video (learned to bypass the editor,) and 2) the WordPress blog is currently going crazy! It split into two columns and is whacked! I'm worrying I'm going to have to reinstall it, so I may be enlisting in your help. Other than that, it's been very easy to post, and we're now trying to figure out how to use the add-ins and to try to customize it!
    thanks,
    Chris
  • Thanks! Tricky to sort through all those plug-ins sometimes. :)
  • @Karen - The plugin I use is called Sig2feed.
  • She made the right decision! If you're serious about blogging or building a business with it, you really should go self-hosted. But Wordpress.com is a great place to get your feet wet (for newbies). Just don't stay there too long.

    I just left my old .com blog up there with a single post directing folks to my new blog. Seemed to work OK. Now I've made it invisible to the search engines then I will eventually delete it.

    A bit off topic Michael...what plug-in are you using to get the copyright notice at the bottom of your feed? I found 3 possible ones: Simple feed, Copyfeed and Rss footer.

    Thanks!
  • @Becky - Great questions! Subscribers were notified of the change in advance. I don't have the exact numbers. The original blog had been in existence since March of 2007 and its home page had acquired a PageRank of 3. The new blog went live in February of 2008. Its home page currently has no PageRank.

    This is one of the pitfalls of starting on a service like WordPress.com. There is no way to do the kind of redirect necessary to retain PageRank when you leave the service. Getting into the right situation for long-term PageRank strength is far more important than hobbling the blog in order to retain the weak PageRank it had at WordPress.com.
  • Great success story, Michael! Question - what happened to her Technorati rankings, her Google page rank, and her subscribers when she moved? I have heard that most things reset to zero when you move from wp.com to wp.org.
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