I'm thinking about moving my blog (http://womantowomancbe.wordpress.com) off of WP.com onto GoDaddy or another similar site, so that I can put advertising on it. Currently, I get about 10-15,000 hits per month, so I figure that any revenue I get will cover the costs incurred, and hopefully more. Before I make the leap, though, I want to make sure that I have everything straight, and understand everything involved.
I will need to get the website set up on an external hosting site, download the WP software, and export my blog to my computer and then import it to the new site. This will set my blog stats back to zero, and I will have to build it back up from scratch, right? Some of my posts are currently highly rated on search engines for certain keywords -- what happens with them? I will lose the rating, and have to build it back up, right? Can I automatically redirect from the current (highly-rated) post on my WP.com blog to the new website, so that when someone clicks on the post it will redirect to the new site? Or should I "hide" my current blog from search engines, so that the new site will get the "fresh" hits? Another problem is that I have *lots* of links from one of my posts to other of my posts, and I don't want to have to go through and manually change the links -- will the links automatically update when I export/import them?
Is there anything else I'm missing? Anything else I should consider? Thanks!
The blog I need help with is womantowomancbe.wordpress.com.