I think this might be one of the most popular questions that we receive.
How much does it cost to start a blog?
I’m going to give you a terrible answer and then a great answer.
The terrible answer is that it depends.
The great answer takes a bit more than that.
What Do You Want?
I think this is the key question to ask when it comes to blogging. Yes, you can definitely make money blogging and there are a number of ways to do it, but some are going to require more money upfront than others.
That doesn’t make one better than the other, it just makes them different.
For example, if you start off blogging and want a premium theme then that will cost money. Maybe you want hosting that is guaranteed to never cause you problems then that is going to cost more than shared hosting.
Maybe you start off by creating a giant course and want to make sure you have upsells and order bumps on your sales funnel, then that’s going to cost.
Maybe you want to start an email list that can do some crazy things with segmentation and tagging. Guess what? That’s going to cost.
Don’t worry if you don’t know any of these things.
You’re just wondering what it takes to start a blog and I would say the initial costs are just two things:
- Hosting
- Domain name
Those are the essentials. If you’re thinking about blogging on a free platform then that is a problem right there because as you evolve with your blogging and your business, you’ll want to move off of a free platform (like Medium) and use something that gives you more control.
Well, guess what happens then?
You have to move all of your content and hope that you do SEO correctly enough that you keep on getting search engine traffic.
What about all of the links from social media? Well, those might be lost if you can’t do a proper redirect of things.
Thankfully, hosting doesn’t have to cost that much.
Our host of choice for getting started is Siteground. They’re a tiny bit more expensive than some of the cheaper hosting companies, but we believe in getting great customer support and great uptime.
That’s what Siteground provides.
Now, you could get a domain main $1-$4 cheaper (or sometimes free for the first year) when you get it through your web host, but we like to use Hover to register our domains.
Again, this isn’t us trying to get you to the most expensive places (.coms are like $12-$15 a year), this is us letting you know what we recommend.
So what do we have so far with costs?
- Hosting: $84/yr
- Domain: $15/yr
$99 / 12 months = $8.25 a monthI don’t think that’s too bad at all. Not when you consider that it’s really all you need to start an online business.
That’s it?
Seriously that’s it. However, we could add on a couple more things if you want.
Optional Additional Costs
Again, everything in this section is optional. I’ll be sure to cover why would we would include them with a blog that we’re starting with but that doesn’t mean you need them to succeed or grow with yours.
A Theme
The default WordPress themes are pretty solid. You could definitely get by with just using them.
We love and use GeneratePress for every single one of our sites. Yes, we have multiple and they all use GeneratePress.
There is a free version and a premium version. We go with the premium version, which is just $59 for unlimited sites, because we like the added features.
But you could get by just fine with the free version.
Email Hosting
Your web host will most likely provide you with an email address and email hosting for your blog, but we like to keep things professional so we use Gsuite.
It’s Google’s professional email solution for businesses and it allows you to use your domain name for your email.
It costs $6 per unique email address, but you can add aliases to a single email address, and in that case $6 per month is all that you will pay.
How Much Does It Cost to Start a Blog on WordPress?
The one thing that you have to be careful of with WordPress is that you want to use the WordPress software and not the WordPress hosting.
The difference is that with WordPress hosting, you’re paying more of a premium and have less control over the whole experience.
Whenever you go through a host like Siteground, you’re using the WordPress software which allows you to do almost anything that you want.
Start a Blog for Cheap
If you want to dive deeper into the logistics of starting a blog then check out The Story of a Woman Who Learned How to Start a Blog for Cheap and also How to Start a Blog: A Simple 10-Step Plan for Blog Success.
The Biggest Investment Is Time
While money is always something that is going to be at the top of your mind, the biggest investment that you’re going to make with blogging involves time.
Once you see that you can keep the costs relatively low then it seems like blogging is a great business. And believe me when I say it is I mean it.
But it’s not one of those businesses where you invest $10 today and get $20 tomorrow. However, it might be something you invest $10 in today and make $100 a month from now.
Over time you might even see a revenue chart like this.
And something like this takes time. But because a blog that continues to add valuable content can get compounding results down the road, any time and effort spent on it, in the beginning, is always worth it.
It Doesn’t Have to Take Months to Monetize Your Blog
The sooner you can create your book and get it out, the sooner you have a chance of making money with every single person who visits your blog.
The 12-Hour eBook Method was designed to help you get a book onto your blog in the shortest time possible so you don’t need to wait until you hit 100,000 pageviews before you can start making money.
How to Start and Get a Quick Return on Investment
I know how it goes. The second you spend money the second you start to think when you’re going to get that money back.
With blogging that can be hard to imagine because you think you need a ton of traffic, but that isn’t the case. We love to teach our students that the best thing you can do for yourself is to make money as quickly as possible.
How do you do that?
We like to start with an ebook. From there, we begin to write our blog content which we turn into social media content which then drives content to our site.
We can show people our book and begin to make money. So while the actual blog itself might not be providing the returns in the short term, in the long term what will happen is that your content will begin to rank and you’ll begin to get passive traffic from the search engines.
Eventually, you’re in a place where you’re getting social media traffic and search engine traffic and all of it is coming to look at your offer.
