How to move a blog from Blogger to Wordpress

Form many people their first blog is on blogger, it certainly was mine when I started a year ago. I had subsequently set up a WordPress blog and was impressed with the featuers of WordPress compared to blogspot - though I think WordPress doesn't do images well, OK but not well.

So running two blogging programs was a bit silly and I thought I would transfer my blogspot blog sometime. What made me get on with though was two things that happened on the weekend:

1. I discovered that if I had got any page rank or other SEO from my blogspot blog I would loose it when I moved from blogspot! Not nice - fortunately ? I don't have any ranking yet
2. Blogspot no longers allows non-google people to leave a link to their blog - the one that's visible when you click their name. This is a new change (Dec 07) and will probably been a huge decrease in comments on blogger blogs of non-blogger commentators. The link is really part of the commentators identity - most people wouldn't know who I was if I couldn't use that link!
3. I decided to enrol in a pay per post program, where you are paid to blog on advertisers subjects, and discovered that a lot of advertisers don't use blogspot blogs. If wouldn't recommend the PPP program now -Google has reduced PageRank of bloggers using it, which means in turns there are limited options to make money from the program itself

Once you are happy that every thing is up and running on the new WordPress blog here are some of things you need to do:

• Change your email signatures on email and forums to link to the new domain

• Add tracking code such as Google Analytics and 103bees to the new domain

• Add the new domain to RSS feed services such as feedburner

• Inform any networks or affiliates of the new domain name if necessary

• Put a message up on the old blogspot blog that the blog has moved to the new domain - I may delete the old messages as well - I am not sure on that yet That will inform any subscribers of the change too as they will have to resubscribe to the new domain name

OK my setup- your mileage may differ: current version of blogger and WordPress 2.3 hosted on Dreamhost

1. Buy your domain name - so if you have been using myname.blogspot.com you might want to buy myname.com if its available.

2. Setup WordPress on your new domain - I left the default theme first off to keep things simple

3. On WP go to the admin panel manage/import and click "blogger" - you will be asked to confirm by google that WP can connect to your blogspot blog.
4. That's it - all the posts and comments for over a year cam accross clearly for me.

Caution

I noticed that the photos in my posts didn't come accross - they appear OK in WP but are still hosted on blogger which I am not very happy about.