Changing Your Blog’s URL

Apologies to those of you who received the Masterful Marketing feed of quite a few posts yesterday. Here’s the scoop on what happened and my learning experience (which were many for the record).

I decided to take Chris Brogan’s advice (don’t remember where but possibly a Twitter post) about turning your web site around and have the blog be the home page to begin the conversation with your target right away. His concept made a lot of sense to me, especially for Masterful Marketing’s audience.

So I embarked on the effort, rebuilding my site from scratch. I did that to remove the subdirectory /mmblog (which has been a thorn in my side for a while so this was a good time to rid myself of that mistake). So I reinstalled WordPress, uploaded my theme and plug ins and reloaded the blog content from the exported XML file. Piece of cake.

(Note: this is a really good way to backup your WordPress blog in the event you need to recreate it after a problem).

Well of course, changing the URL required me to update a bunch of things such as Technorati, Google Adwords, LinkedIn, etc. etc., and of course, my Feedburner feed. I didn’t recreate the feed, just updated it so it pointed to masterful-marketing.com and resynched it to clear out what was there and reload the feed with the proper addresses.

Hm so I guess resynching must have caused Feedburner to think these posts were new and resent them out to all my subscribers.

The good news is masterful-marketing.com is now how I want it set up and I can stop stressing over it, the feed still works, Google Webmaster tools has stopped giving me errors, and I hopefully made the change before I caused too much damage.