If you have a few thousand bucks you don’t know what to do with you can go out and buy an established blog that’s already getting traffic and making money. But you’re probably here because you want to know what’s the bare minimum you can spend and still start a business. Don’t worry, you really can start your blogging career on less than a shoestring. Let’s take a look.
You Can Start A Blog For Free
More than one successful, top-ranking blogger started out using a free blogging platform like WordPress, Blogger or Weebly. These sites cost absolutely nothing and you can register and set up a blog in a few hours. In most cases these sites should be sufficient for handling your traffic for at least the first year.
Moving Up A Level
The downside of those free blogging platforms is that you’re limited in bandwidth and many of them have restrictions on what you can do to monetize your blog. So once you start getting steady traffic and it’s time to start making money you’ll want to purchase your own domain name and web hosting.
A top level dot com domain name will cost approximately $8 to $10 for one year. Web hosting will run around $8 per month if you purchase the entry-level package. If you only have one blog this will probably be good enough hosting to get you through the next year or two.
Other Blogging Expenses
Assuming you invest the bare minimum, mentioned above, be prepared to work your tail off to grow your business. If you’ve never blogged before, never worked in marketing and have no computer skills to speak of then there’s a lot you have to learn. It’s definitely possible to learn it all without spending any money as long as you understand it’s also going to take longer to learn it. There’s a reason why they say “You have to spend money to make money.”
- Mentoring/Info Products: You’ll grow your business much faster if you hire a mentor, but be prepared to fork over some cash. You’ll most likely end up buying tons of “Make Money Online” guides and learning everything the hard way – like most of us have done. These guides will cost anywhere from $5 to $500 and if you’re not careful you’ll waste a lot of money on useless information. Which is another good reason to hire a mentor. In the end, you’ll end up spending the same amount of money but with a mentor you’ll learn what you need to know.
- Email Service Providers: At some point every blogger needs to develop an email marketing list and to do this you need to sign up with a reputable email service provider. It’s a must and there’s no getting around it. Aweber will cost approximately $30 per month starting out and as your list grows, so grows your fee.
- Software: Along the way may need to purchase software, depending on your business. It’s not necessary to get started and you really won’t need to worry about it until your blog starts turning into a business but be aware – there may be software expenses somewhere down the line.
- Professional Services: Branding and presentation are big parts of any business, even for blogs. At some point you’ll want to enlist designers to create a professional logo and theme for your blog. Again, this expense may never come about if you can learn how to do these things yourself, but it’s best to know they’re out there on the horizon.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!