advice please – wordpress vs???

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  eumaeus · Member · May 21, 2011 at 8:54 pm

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  I have a dilemma on my hands. I started my blog about two months ago, with the intention that eventually I would like to be able to earn some income from it. It is slow progress, as I knew absolutely NOTHING about blogging unti lI started it. But it is progressing, I am finding my way around wordpress and the search engines are starting to find me, although I have a niche that may never take off enough to earn from. But I just realised that my wordpress blog does not allow advertising which I assume means no amazon links etc?

  I believe there are a lot of advantages to wordpress and would like to stay here while I find my feet and learn more about it all. But, if I stay at wordpress, and then move when I am ready to start trying to earn money from my blog (assuming I ever reach that stage) will I then have to start from scratch again getting the search engiens to find me? Is there anything I can do while I am here at wordpress.com that will make that eventual move easier?

  TIA

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  thesacredpath · Member · May 21, 2011 at 9:01 pm

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  My suggestion would be to get your own domain name as soon as possible and map it to your site here. Then at some point if you decide to do advertising when you move you take your domain name with you and you will not lose any of your search engine ranking.

  An alternate to that if you do not want the expense at this point is to get the site redirect upgrade here when you do move, but although that is a great thing, the new domain name would still be starting from zero with the search engines. All traffic trying to go to your old blog here would get redirected, but you would still be trying to build brand with the new domain name in the middle of things. Generally it would take 3-6 months for the search engines to move all the search engine ranking and such over to the new domain name and to get rid of the old links from their indexes.

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  eumaeus · Member · May 21, 2011 at 9:09 pm

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  Thank you – that makes sense. So I basically choose a domain name and pay for it . Then do I just replace my current domain name with the new one in the settings page? Or is there more to it than that? Sorry to be dense

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  timethief · Member · May 21, 2011 at 9:32 pm

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  @eumaeus
  Make sure that the domain is available for registration.
  Register a new domain through WordPress.com and set up domain mapping from your wordpress.com blog to your domain
  The process is described here > http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/register-domain/

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  eumaeus · Member · May 21, 2011 at 9:52 pm

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  Thank you, the link make sit all clear.

  Thank you both for your help :)

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  timethief · Member · May 21, 2011 at 9:53 pm

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  You’re welcome and best wishes. :)

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  timethief · Member · May 21, 2011 at 9:57 pm

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  May I add something please? After you go through the process of purchasing the domain and domain mapping do note that the process will take time. It may take up to 72 hours before the domain name change propagates throughout the internet. We have no control over how long it takes all those locations to flush their DNS caches. You can check on the process here by simply typing in the URL. http://www.whatsmydns.net/
  Also note that on the Admin side of your blog you will still see the wordpress.com root URLs for things like images etc. that’s normal.

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  eumaeus · Member · May 21, 2011 at 10:12 pm

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  OK – thank you for the warning – i would have been getting panicky that i had messed it up :)