It isn’t often I write about something that isn’t real estate related, but since I recommend to people in my eBook “How to be a Cash Magnet for Your Real Estate Deals” that you should be blogging your experiences to position yourself as an expert, I will tell you my saga of converting from a Blogger site to a WordPress site, and what the hiccup was that delayed the complete transition.
Why Convert from Blogger to WordPress?
I stayed on the Blogger platform for YEARS. It provided me a easy way to blog, allowed me to put up ads that were relevant to my blog posts (and make a few extra dollars per month). Everyone kept telling me how easy WordPress was, and it wasn’t until I joined my own mentoring group with Ali Brown’s Elevate Program that I realized I needed a more robust system to accomplish everything I wanted. No more pushing back the decision. It was time to face learning a new technical platform, and transition what I had without losing the incredible traction I had gotten with the existing blogger platform.
But what about those YEARS of blog posts on my real estate experiences? Would I risk losing the search engine links? Would my business be disrupted? Well, the answer is, and was, YES.
WordPress has it’s own world of plug-in’s that solve every problem imaginable. I’ve now got my own store, an easy to develop sales page, a membership site (soon), plus I can still blog and enjoy the many features of cross-promoting and leveraging the attention I strive for this site.
I tried several plug-ins and found one that allowed me to limp along. I mean, I was able to have the old posts redirect to my new post, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get all of my posts showing as if I had a full WordPress site.
If you normally like reading about real estate, you most likely won’t enjoy the rest of the post because it gets a little nerdy.
[sociallocker]
First I tackled the problem of the authorship issue – that’s setting everything up correctly so my picture will appear by a blog post that correlates with someone’s search terms on Google. Much frustration and waiting and voila – it finally started working.
Then there was that nagging little problem with those darn 5 years of blog posts not showing up on my blog page. I researched the issues through all the technical sites, even discovered I had been a target to some injected PHP code that I had to clear out. I was ready to start modifying the code itself, based on different recommendations from different expert sites, and then I finally noticed something: The imported posts from Blogger didn’t come through as ME being the author. So sure enough, I made that minor change and the posts started showing up on the blog page.
[/sociallocker]
So that may have been more information than you wanted to know about my “behind the scenes” work that I do when I’m not investing in real estate. I promise the next blog post WILL directly be related to real estate investing.