We often learn best through stories. When we read a story, we become a part of the story. So here’s a story about starting a blog for cheap.
There was a woman once who needed to figure out how to start a blog for cheap.
She used to be a young girl who loved to read all day and she did well in school and although she was quiet, she had friends and family who loved and encouraged her.
She grew up and got a job and a husband and then she had a couple of kids.
She loved her husband and her children were the light of her world.
She was so busy caring for them, the house, her job, and her husband that she barely noticed that she didn’t have time to read anymore.
But that was ok. She was so happy. Her family meant the world to her and while they had their struggles, it was all she really wanted.
I mean, sure she missed reading and she didn’t get to see her old friends much and she kind of missed how her work used to be a more meaningful part of her life.
She didn’t have the greatest job in the world, but she had always been competitive and the work world gave her an outlet for that.
Since her second child, however, she’d cut her hours back to part-time. She could tell that “part-time” meant more than just fewer hours to her bosses.
It meant she’d become less essential. To them, it meant she was less invested in the company.
Maybe they were right.
It also meant money was tight, but it was worth it to have more time with her kids while they were young.
She didn’t mind scrimping on groceries or doing her hair color from a box at home or driving around in the car they bought 8 years ago because it was paid off.
None of that mattered. They were sacrifices she was happy to make.
She did wonder if there were ways that she could contribute more to the family without sacrificing time with her family.
She had an old friend who had started a blog a few years ago and was making a little supplemental income from the ads that she had on the site.
Because she had always loved to read, writing was something that came natural to her, so a blog made sense to her.
She could write and eventually make some extra money like her friend and maybe she’d go back to getting her hair done at the salon. (She missed her hairdresser! She’d become a friend).
And it did give her that little spark of excitement to think about starting something new. It seemed adventurous. That feeling she used to get, that competitiveness was kicked on when she thought about it.
It would have to fit in the already tight budget, though. And she’d have to talk to her husband about it.
Her husband is great, but he’s not much of a dreamer.
He wouldn’t understand the “blog” idea and would see it as a wild dream, or worse, a scam like when she tried that Jewelry Home Party thing a few years ago.
Before she talked to him, she’d need to have her numbers straight. Exactly how much would this cost? Are there monthly fees?
She needed to figure out how to start a blog for cheap and then she needed to convince her husband.
What Would She Need to Start a Blog?
There’s a thing about people who read. They tend to be methodical and this woman was that.
She didn’t know how to start a blog but she knew how to use Google and that’s exactly what she did.
what do i need to start a blogHosting
Hosting was the first thing it seemed she needed. It had something to do with servers which sounded technical and unimportant to her.
What did sound important were the prices.
Monthly fees could be paid monthly, or you could get a discount if you paid a year in advance.
There were tons of recommendations for something called Bluehost.
Sure it was cheap.
But she had a skeptical mind and felt that $2.95 a month had to be too good to be true.
(She was right. Bluehost is a notoriously poor service but has an excellent affiliate program which is why there were all of those glowing reviews. Our woman has good intuition).
She eventually found a mention of Siteground. It had positive reviews and lots of mentions of excellent customer service.
That was important to her since she didn’t understand, nor did she want to understand all of the technical stuff. She wanted to know that Siteground would be there to help with that.
And the price was right, too. $6.99 a month. That seemed reasonable enough but not so cheap that it made her skeptical.
Domain Name
Google told her the next thing she’d need was a domain name. She knew that meant the web address that she would choose for her blog.
She didn’t know that was an extra cost, but it was a yearly fee which made sense since it would secure her web address for her blog.
She found Hover.com which specialized in just domain names. She liked that.
She saw that she could have registered the domain name with Siteground, but she liked the idea of a company that specialized in just the domains.
She was able to find a domain name she liked and it would cost just $12.99 for an entire year.
A WordPress Theme
Now things were starting to get tricky. A theme?
She’d been digging around enough in the “how to start a blog” world that she knew themes could be tricky. And expensive.
She’d found an article about web design mistakes that could also cost you money, too. She definitely wanted to avoid that once she got things rolling.
She did a lot of research on themes. She compared and contrasted what she liked about blogs that she visited.
Two things were important to her when it came to choosing the right theme after she’d done all of her research.
She needed a decent price and she needed something that was easy to customize.
That article that she’d read on Web Design Mistakes had recommended Generate Press. It’s what they used as a theme.
The site had a beautiful, clean feel to it that she liked.
There was a free version of Generate Press that she could start with and everything she read about it said it was very simple to customize.
That Can’t Be It. Can it?
So she had Siteground she could host her blog with for $6.99/mo (paid annually for under a hundred bucks) and the domain was going to be $12.99. The theme was free.
So that meant the conversation with her husband at this point was going to be pretty easy.
$96.87.
To start a blog? That would make her money.
She had to be missing something.
Education
There is something missing.
Yes, our woman could spend $96.87 and have a blog up and running.
There are lots of things that do cost money that she could eventually add on, but really, to get started that’s what you really need.
Except for one thing.
She needed some education.
She’d done enough Googling at this point to know that she did not want to be Googling every single question that came to her mind while she was working on this blog.
Even though she wasn’t going to have to put up a lot of money up front, she was going to be putting up a lot of her time and she didn’t want to waste it.
She wanted to know she was doing things the right way so that she would be on a path to make some money.
It was by pure luck or SEO magic that she stumbled onto the Blog Simple Guide.
It was a massive FREE resource for new bloggers.
What she appreciated about this resource is that it was actually free. She didn’t even have to enter her email address to get a download of it.
Something about that rang true for her. If there was this much value with no expectation of anything in return, imagine what value there would be when she did enter her email address or pay for a course?
As she read through (since it was free she didn’t even have to wait to have that conversation with her husband) she began to understand that blogging was about more than just writing articles and eventually earning money from ads on her site.
Blogging was actually part of a business.
Her own business?
This was getting those old competitive feelings firing. She felt that spark ignited and quietly whispered to herself,
“You can do this”.
When she finished the Blog Simple Guide, she added to her spreadsheet of expenses a course from the creator of the Guide called the Blog Simple Framework.
She felt ready to talk to her husband.
And That’s How You Start a Blog for Cheap
I hope you enjoyed the story of our woman who loves her family and reading.
Are you excited about her journey from starting a blog for cheap to starting her own business?
It’s an interesting twist, right?
If you want to take the same journey that she did then feel free to look below.
What we do here at Odd Noodle is build online businesses and help others learn how to build their own. One of the key components of the online business is the blog.
You can even see that with our own brands how each of them starts with a blog.
