If you know the word ‘blog’, chances are you also know of a website called Blogger, where you can create your own blog for free. No setting up, monthly or even yearly fee unless you want to use your own domain name. I also use their free service to create a blog when I started blogging in 2004, although I didn’t blog that often. But lately, more and more people started blogging not only as a means to express themselves, but also to earn money.

There are now more than 50 million blog sites on the internet with around 170.000 more blog sites is created every day, that is approximately 2 blog sites per second. So I decided to continue blogging, but this time with an added incentive, that is to try and make some extra cash from my blog.

At first I decided to continue writing on my Blogger Blog. But I always wanted to have my own domain and website, so I decided to make a new one with my own name instead. I also found out that you have better chances to make money from the internet if you have your own domain name for your blog or site instead of using a free one, it adds credibility, they said.

Looking around on the internet, I learned that most people are basing their blog on WordPress, so I decided to see for myself what WordPress is all about since I haven’t heard about them before. I found out that there are actually two kinds of a WordPress blog. The first one is WordPress as a free blog creation service not much different from Blogger. But the second one is different, because they are not a service but rather WordPress as a platform to publish your blog, as you can see them saying on their site:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

So I searched again on the internet to find out how to actually publish my site using WordPress. I found out that WordPress based their platform on PHP and mySQL database. I’m not a programmer, so I found the possibility of having to understand PHP and mySQL a daunting task (I found later that it was actually not as hard as I first thought it would be). But there is actually an easier way to build your site, which is by using a hosting service that features Fantastico.

Fantastico is a feature that enable you to build and publish your site with just a few clicks of your mouse (and a little typing too). I use Bluehost hosting for my blog, and so far am satisfied with it. They give you 1.5GB in space and 15GB bandwidth transfer limit per month. (I’ll write a post later about how to build and publish a WordPress blog using Fantastico and Bluehost).

So I finally managed to build and publish my blog using WordPress platform as you can see for yourself by reading this blog. But since it was pretty empty at first, I decided to import my old posts from Blogger to this site. Fortunately, WordPress have a built in feature that allows you to import your posts from Blogger (and several other blogging site also) directly to your WordPress powered blog.

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This is the step by step explanation on how to do it:

1. Login to your Blog, the direct link to it should be something like this -> http://yoursite.com/wp-login.php

2. On your Dashboard, click Manage.

3. On the Manage Page, click on Import.

4. On the Import Page, click on Blogger if you want to import from Blogger.

5. On the Import Blogger Page, click on Authorize.

6. Insert your Google Account username and password. (This step is not required if you are already logged in to your Blogger Account).

7. Click the Grant access button.

8. Choose which Blog whose Posts you want to be imported by clicking its corresponding Import button.

9. Click Save Changes and you’re done!

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Don’t forget to check your posts to make sure everything is intact. Oh, the idea to this post is actually because Blake Tillman asked me if it is possible to transfer a blog from Blogger to Wordpress. It is actually possible to transfer the posts. But if you already done some customizing to your Blogger blog, you would have to redo them manually on WordPress. But there are plenty of Widgets to help you do that which you can found on WordPress Codex site. There are a lot of great free Template on the web for Wordpress that you can use for your blog. I hope this helps and happy blogging!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 5:50 am and is filed under Blogging, Health, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.