How a Blogger lost domain name and 12K visitors?

I learnt a very hard lesson recently after my domain name selfimprovementpath.com was “grabbed” by someone. The renewal mails went to a mail id I don’t use currently and it led to the expiry of the name. Currently, the guy who purchased it has parked it on Godaddy for cash, obviously trying to make some money from the 12K visitors who’ll land up there.

Having built it over the past couple of years it was painful. But I needed a kick in my butt for not updating my email id on my Godaddy account.

But what I did after I realized the loss was to quickly get another domain name (www.Selfgrowthtips.com) mapped to my content hosted on blogger.com. And then went through the following steps:

1. Updated the new blog url on my Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, About.me, Slideshare and directories where my blog was listed
2. Wrote to all those linking in to my old blog, seeking help in updating my new domain url (Some obliged rightaway while I’m yet to hear from others)
3. Update my current email id on my godaddy account
4. Set up my domain name for “Auto Renew”
5. Did a brief post on blogger to tell search engines and visitors about the domain name change
6. Updated Google analytics and Adsense

Has anyone else faced this before? And what do you suggest.