Blogging is an exciting and profitable adventure. You get to share your expertise, creativity, opinions and you can use it for marketing. If you’re serious, you can turn it into a profitable income stream.
Even though over 2.88 million blog posts get shared daily, the majority of blogs fail in their first year. Profitable blogs call for dedication, time, and most importantly, money.
If you’re thinking about starting one, use this guide to know how much does it cost to start a blog.
Costs of Starting a Blog
To get a good picture of blog costs, approach blogging like how to start any other business. Take into account the costs incurred from starting from scratch. Then add them to other recurring blogging expenses.
You also need the necessary tools to start a blog. For instance, it’s a prerequisite to have a stable internet connection or a computer early on.
Combining all those mini expenses will help you to establish how much does it cost to start a blog. Next are more standard requirements that add to your blog’s cost.
Blogging Hardware
Most of the time, it’s up to you to decide the quality and cost of your working tools. If you want to save costs, buy a reliable desktop that can sustain you until your blog starts to earn.
A decent smartphone can also come in handy for taking photos. You can also use it to update your blog when you’re not near your desktop. You also need a comfortable working place if you blog from home.
If you consider internet costs above $35 per month, your initial costs can add up to $2000. You may spend far less if you already have the hardware or if you opt for a cheap desktop/ laptop.
Domain Name and Hosting
Free blog sites limit your control on design and have weak monetization potential. If you want to profit from blogging, you need an autonomous platform. That’s where the question of how much to start a website comes in.
To start a website or a paid blog site, you need a domain name and somewhere to host your site. Domain prices can range from free to thousands of dollars per domain. Most authority domains go for a premium.
In 2019, voice.com sold for $30 million. For a bargain domain, go to Namecheap, Bluehost, GoDaddy, or Flippa.com. Finding discount codes and deals for these sites are fairly easy.
Hosting costs start from $3 up to $ 10 per month for shared hosting. For dedicated hosting, you can spend up to $30 per month. Meaning, you can quickly set up your blog site for as low as $20.
Blog Design and Theme Costs
When designing your website, you can use free or premium themes. The colors, styling, and the structure of your blog site affect its potential. Most free themes are not easy to customize. So they can limit your control of the website’s entire looks.
Plugins to improve the functionalities of your blog can also come at a cost. Most WordPress plugins limit their basic features and upgrading can unlock their usefulness. The plugins integrate contact forms, social sharing, and so many other features.
Themes and plugin prices usually cost from $0 to $100 for premium ones. You also have the option to hire a website designer but at a high cost. Overall, there are plenty of free options so this would be up to your discernment.
Content Marketing to Grow Your Blog
Content marketing is about creating useful and relevant content to build an audience. It’s one of the best marketing strategies and ways of how to start a profitable blog.
It involves creating unique blog posts, videos, or podcasts for promoting your blog. Yet, it has to be consistent for relevancy and to increase your blog’s reliability.
If you’re a savvy content creator, you can save a lot of expenses from outsourcing. For instance, you’ll be writing your blog posts or research to improve the value of your content.
But it can be hectic and sometimes you’ll need to hire blog writers to help you. In that case, you may pay from $0.03 per word or more for each post.
Meanwhile, content marketing goes hand in hand with SEO. When you combine them, they work effectively to increase traffic to your blog.
Creating SEO-optimized-content can be costly if you have to hire a specialist. You’ll need a lot of time to research the terms that are popular with your audience. Yoast suggests creating excellent cornerstone SEO articles to rank your blog. Besides, the cornerstone content will demand other posts to increase ranking chances.
Buying high-quality articles will spike your blog costs. You’ll need to invest in keyword research and internal linking tools. Sometimes, SEO can become hard to crack and only SEO experts can bail you out.
Social Media Marketing for a Blog
Also, consider social media when figuring out how much does it cost to start a blog. Research shows 66% of marketers use blogs in their social media marketing. To attract traffic to your site, you’ll need to post on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Medium, or Quora.
Social media posting will help you to grow your blog faster and build a community around your blog. You can post by yourself to cut some blog costs. But if you want to streamline it, you must invest in social media management tools.
The tools include Hubspot, Hootsuite, Coschedule, MeetEdgar, and many more. Each stool may have its unique aspects, and their costs can vary from free upwards.
Luckily popular platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn are free to use. You’ll have to consider allotting funds if you choose to start running ads.
How Much Does It Cost to Start a Blog?
There’s a massive variation in the blog price aspects. It’s even hard to establish how much does it cost to start a blog. Above all, the cost of starting a blog depends on your budget and how fast you want to grow it.
You can start on the lower end with a domain name, affordable hosting, internet, and working tools. A blog can cost almost next to nothing to start or you can spend hundreds upfront depending on how prepared you already are. Remember to reinvest any revenue you make.
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