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).

Lid said:

Great post Michael – thanks!

One thing I did want to mention – because we have just had huge dramas doing this ourselves – is that WordPress.com does allows its blogs to be redirected to your own self-managed domain, for a fee of $10/year. (This is managed within the WordPress administration dashboard, select “Upgrades” and then “Domains”.)

The only problem with this is that it uses a 302 (temporary) redirect instead of the 301 (permanent) redirect that Google prefers…so yep, you lose your links.

I agree that you really should set up your own self hosted blog up front – because the day will come that you want to move, and then it gets tricky.

Mad said:

I just want to follow up on Lid’s comment that it is possible to get WordPress.com to redirect your blog hosted by them to your new domain name.

We found the whole issue confusing, and ended writing an Open Letter to Automattic in frustration and Matt provided the necessary information to get it done.

We also wrote up a step by step guide on how to redirect your WordPress.com blog to your own WordPress hosted blog.

The hardest part was convincing ourselves that it was OK to fiddle with our domains DNS settings, which GoDaddy (our host) made very easy, and I assume other hosts would offer similar screens.

I hope this is of help to others.

You can see this in action as http://blogwell.wordpress.com is automatically redirected to http://blog-well.com.

Sandy said:

I also have recently transitioned from WordPress.com to my own pay server running WordPress. And just like Carla, my main problem was with redirecting permalinks. I am going to post a how-to regarding this soon, but in a nutshell, there are two things you need to do to make this transition smoother:

1. You need to pay WordPress.com to use your own domain name. That way, yourblog.com will be redirected to yourblog.wordpress.com. Google will use yourblog.com to establish permalinks.

2. When it’s time to move to your own server, simply move yourblog.com along with it. The only remaining trick is if you decide on a different permalink structure (WordPress.com uses /year/month/day/postname), and there’s a WordPress plug-in called Permalink Redirect that takes care of that for you.

I didn’t do 1) so I had to manually link all my old articles to the new permalink.

There was one more issue that required a MySQL query to fix – internal links from my blog posts needed to be edited to reflect the new permalinks. Luckily I found someone who gave me step by step instructions on how to edit the WordPress MySQL database directly.

I would like to thank you folks for your super-helpful comments. You are examples of how commenting on other blogs is supposed to be: contributing value that comes back to yourselves while building relationships and community.