Need quick advice from experienced blogger.

I am really debating on what I should do...

I opened up a Blogger.com blog and I started posting articles and trying to sell products. Everything was going great. I was getting around 50-100 views per hour on my blog. Well, since this blog was doing so well I decided I should buy an official domain and host my own blog. Well, I added a link to on my Blogger.com blog and said "Site has been moved to ********.com, check out our new site!"

Well, I continued to do the same marketing techniques to bring in the traffic that I had previously been getting. Nope, things didn't work out as planned. My traffic is now down to around 20 views per day, and I only had 1 hop link click today - on my Blogger.com blog I was receiving around 45-50 clicks per day to my product's sales page.

I know I'm targeting the right audience, but I don't know what happened. Do people just generally like Blogger.com blogs better than self hosted Wordpress blogs? The blog I have now looks 100 times more professional and cleaner. I don't know what to say.

google love blogger

and this is because your previous blogger blog was having search engine authority because it was old
it will be hard to have a fresh start with wordpress

why you leave blogger there are so many templates for blogger and you can use your domain for blogger
never leave your old project and try to start a new project in free time

Don't Google own Blogger? There's the first part of your answer - by proximity, Blogger sites get better treatment from Google. Unfair but true. Secondly, changing your site when it's doing well by moving it to a different platform is a mistake. By all means make it look more professional, improve things like content and SEO, but moving it to a new domain means you lose all the juice that the old site had just by existing where it did.

X9RILLION,

There are some pieces of information missing that could shed some light on why this is happening. How long did you have the blogger blog setup for? How long have you now had the Wordpress site setup for? Did you do any SEO to the blogger blog? If so what did you do exactly and how extensive is the work that you have done?

The reason I ask is that if you have done a lot of SEO work to the old blog and it had been out on the web for a while (a year or more) then it will take some time to get the other (new) blog more attention in search and on the web in general.

The other issue is your redirect. Having a link on a page is not the most ideal way to redirect people to a new website. Really you want the experience to be seemless for users and by setting up a 301 redirect or even just a forward in blogger, you will be able to capture all of your old traffic.

Here is how to set up a custom redirect in blogger,

http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2472689

Also, (and while others may not agree) it does not matter in the eyes of search engines whether you are using Wordpress, or blogger, or Joomla or Drupal or have a custom made solution in terms of SEO. A website is a website and search engines serve relevant pages. There is no conclusive evidence that they favor one platform over another.

Hope that helps,

Shawn

You should have used the blogspot.com url, it was really too helpful to you..... now you can start freshly with blogspot.com url..

Blogspot is strong and reputable domain. Stick with it for now and work on your website or host your domain with blogspot.

its generally a bad decision to close down something that has traffic already, because you bought a new domain.. You should have kept your blogspot blog intact and simply continue the work on the new domain..

Never change a working System.

Maybe you weren't interpreting the stats correctly for your blogger domain blog and or they were incorrect?

I agree with what others said.
My blog with privet domain and hosting while my friend's blog is in blogger
His blog is doing very will in short period of time while mine is not even is the age of my blog is 6 years, but his blog just 1 year

Advise you to go back to your old one.
You may start a new blog with different idea using your new domain

Hopefully it helped

What you had going on for you is the authority of a google owned property. And with time your own self-hosted domain can gain some authority as long as you continue to update content, keep visitors engaged and set up some sort of long term backlinking campaign.