Planning the move - Moving a blog - Part1

As we begin the start of our move to our new home, I thought I would discuss some of the problem and pitfalls of moving a blog to a new domain/site and how best to deal with these minor crisis’s. but before we start we need to think through the whole process and ask ourselves why we are moving.

Why are you moving?
When people first start a blog it normally starts on one of the free services such as wordpress.com or blogger, these services provide a great no risk way to get a blog of the ground and most people are busy with there first post in a matter of minutes. However as time marches on the limitations of these services start to appear, the ability to adapt the theme to the way you want or to add that really cool widget you saw on some one site starts to build. The answer is to set up a new site but how do you manage migration of visitors? This site was kept separate from the Venture Skills site to help gain multiple positions on SERP for our own brand, but it has grown into a nice budding community and now it’s time for it to rejoin the main site, when V3 is launched in the near future. So this series will act as the demonstration for the techniques discussed.

The Move
We can break the move down into the following sections

1. Planning
2. Migrating feed users
3. Duality vs Big bang
4. Re pointing - linking
5. Content moving
6. Site promotion

It is important to plan your move well ahead, to give you, your site and your visitors notice of the intentional move. What planning and work can be done ahead of time really depends on how your current blog is set-up.

Free or service hosted blogs
If you don’t have control of the database or site then your options are limited both in terms of what you can plan for and how you can limit any impact to your site. You will have to move most of the content by hand, and will not be able to rely on nice redirect scripts.

Hosted Blogs
If you control the database and have some access to the server, your life is a lot easier, you can access the database and extract the content, in an automated way. You can also use redirect methods, to redirect users to the new blog making the move much more smooth. Relax take a chill pill you are in a far better position then your service hosted equivalents.

Now a quick check list do you…

• Have backup copies of your posts/database?
• Third party feeds?
• email newsletter systems?
• A list of your top 20 commenter’s?
• A list of your Tags?
• A list of sites which have editable info that include your blog (you may want to have password/username here)

If you don’t have some of those things then its time to start collecting, by third party feeds we are talking about feed services that syndicate your feed such as feedburner.

Wants you have collected the information its time, to make a start, I’m going to presume you are already developing the new blog site it self, and so will concentrate on the migration of the current blog. Join us in part 2 when we look at migrating your feed readers.

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