Book Blogging 101 – Transferring Followers from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Welcome back to my newest blog series…Book Blogging 101. I am no expert, these are simply things that I have discovered or learned from my book blogging journey. I hope that these tips and tricks I share can be helpful to you.

Tip #6: Transferring your followers from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

So, If you follow me on twitter then you already know I was recently stressed out when I switched to my self-hosted blog site. This was primarily because I had to start with zero followers, I was starting over. By the way, if you do not already follow me on twitter…shame on you. Just kidding! But really, you should. Now, back to it… I thought I had to begin at square one. When I had well over 200 followers this was a shock. I won’t lie, I was really upset. Thank was until Kaleena from Reader Voracious came to my rescue. She told me there was a way to migrate followers from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. So, I went on a hunt. I needed to find a way to migrate all of my amazing follower…and I did!

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have Jetpack installed on your self-hosted webpage. Seriously, do it! It is great for tracking your statistics but you also need it to be able to migrate your followers over from your old blog. Now that you have Jetpack installed, let’s continue.

• Log into your WordPress.com account and go to your My Sites page.

 

 

• 2. Click “Switch Site” and select the self-hosted blog that now has Jetpack installed.

 

• Scroll down the left-hand sidebar and click on settings.

 

 

• Now click on the discussion tab and scroll all the way to the bottom. There you will see an area that says “Migrate followers from another site.” Click that.

 

 

 

• Now you will see a page that looks like this. Select the blog that has the followers you wish to migrate, using the drop-down menu. Then hit migrate.

 

 

• You will now see a popup window that will want you to confirm that you want the followers to be transferred.

 

 

• Click “ok” to proceed with the transfer. Now another notice will appear at the top of your screen notifying you that your migration request has been queued.

 

 

• You will receive one email telling you the transfer has begun and another when the transfer finished. It did not take long to complete, maybe 2 minutes maximum.

 

• Though you may have received the email verifying the completion of the transfer, it may take up to a day for follower count stats to transfer to the dashboard properly.

 

• Email followers will continue to get emails with new posts, but WordPress.com followers will only see new posts in the Reader. If they wish to continue getting email notifications, they need to subscribe to receive them on your new self-hosted blog.

 

There, now you should have all of your followers on your new self-hosted blog! Now wasn’t that much simpler than you thought it would be? I was expecting some in-depth, complicated method. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was incredibly simple and quick.

Now, if you previously followed my WordPress.com blog, please be sure to subscribe again here if you wish to receive email notification when I post new content. I think I will eventually just install a plugin that allows me to send a monthly newsletter, that won’t be for a long time yet. My next big mission is to use software my father-in-law gave me to design my own layout and migrate it to my new self-hosted site. I have a vision and just need to make it happen.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this Book Blogging tip! Let me know what you think below. Do you self-host or are you thinking about it? Did you have any issues when you moved to self-hosted? Do you have any advice for fellow book bloggers?