Does it cost money to start a blog? You can always start blogging for free with the free WordPress plan, com, which includes our best-in-class hosting. Our diverse payment plans offer additional features perfect for personal use, freelancers, small businesses, and online stores. Yes, you can create a blog for free. There are a lot of different platforms that will allow you to do this, such as WordPress and Blogger.
All you need to do is create an account and choose a template for your site. You can then start writing publications and publishing them online. Of course, if you want to customize your site or make money with your blog, you'll eventually have to switch to a paid plan. But you don't have to do it right away: you can start with a free account and see how things go.
If you're looking to start a hobby blog for fun, you can start doing it without any financial investment. If you're looking to keep costs as low as possible, these are the minimum IT costs to start your blog. So, if you want your own domain name, you'll have to buy hosting. Your hosting platform is basically the house where your website lives, and you'll have to pay the hosting “rent” on a monthly or annual basis.
If you don't want to commit to 36 months, you can also choose a 12- or 24-month plan for an extra one or two dollars per month. Bluehost often has discounts, so your blog costs could be even lower. If you want to keep costs as low as possible, this is the only expense you have to pay to start your blog. None of these options are absolutely crucial when you're in the early stages, but they can be useful pretty quickly, especially if your goal is to run a blogging business.
By the way, thinking about your blog as a business can be a major change in mentality. If you really want to make money blogging, you should allow yourself to invest in the right services to help your blog grow. However, if you want even more design and customization options, you can buy a theme. Once again, you don't have to pay for a topic right away if your budget is tight as a new blogger.
But if you want more customization and flexibility in the theme of your website, you can get it by paying for a theme. However, if you prefer to leave the creation of the logo to professionals, you can hire someone to design your logo on a site like Fiverr or Upwork. Often, a blog promises a gift, such as an e-book, a cheat sheet, a checklist, a discount code on its products, or another free gift in exchange for your email. It's never too early to start collecting emails, as your email list can be very lucrative.
If you're going to spend on a blog expense other than your hosting plan, I recommend converting it into ConvertKit's email marketing software. Another blogging expense you might consider has to do with social media. Ranking on Google takes months, so if you want to attract immediate traffic to your blog, you can take advantage of the power of social networks. To choose, think about where you spend most of your time, what your skills are and what channel would work best with your blog.
If you have a lifestyle or travel blog, for example, you might have better luck on Instagram, full of images. However, if you focus on personal finance, you might do better on the visual search engine that is Pinterest. And Facebook can be effective if your goal is to bring people together in a community. Whatever you choose, you can invest in one of these social media tools to make your life a little easier.
But, I repeat, if you're trying to keep costs down, these tools don't have to be a priority. If you need a special feature, you may have to buy an add-on for your blog, which means that the costs of your blog will increase. But before you buy one, look for recommendations to see if you can find something that works just as well for free. ConvertKit forms can be very effective at converting blog visitors into email subscribers, but if you want to increase conversions even more, you can invest in landing page software.
But if you've accumulated traffic and decided to sell your own digital products, this software could help convert more visitors to your blog into paying customers. Every platform is different, so an ad that works on one platform may not work on another. Before you increase the costs of your blog by buying ads, you need to make sure that the ads are worth it. If you want your name to appear on all your articles (maybe you're building your brand or establishing your area of expertise), you could hire ghostwriters.
Another great blogging course is The Profitable Creator by Melyssa Griffin. This course is ideal for bloggers who already have some experience and are ready to create an online course. As a blogger, your laptop is your most important asset. If you don't have one, or if your current one freezes all the time, it might be time to invest in a new laptop.
If you decide to create an online course for your blog audience, you'll probably want to buy a microphone for the best sound quality. My number one choice is this microphone from FIFINE. It's very easy to set up and will make any recording you make sound professional. And if you can afford it, my next recommendation would be to buy a blogging course so that you can learn all the things you don't yet know about successful bloggers.
As an added benefit, when I decided to launch a new blog about complementary food on VeganTable, I already had additional licenses to use my favorite WordPress theme, so those cost-sharing come in handy as your network of websites grows over time. Especially if you're planning to monetize your site in the near future, opting for a blog with WordPress will be the right foundation. Whether you choose to use a website builder, WordPress, or a web designer to create your blog, there are some additional costs that you may not have considered. However, while web hosting and a domain name are the only costs you should pay, there are still other possible costs of managing a WordPress site.
Beyond those costs, if you're a DIY person, you should be able to handle most of the WordPress maintenance on your own. Here's why, if you're just starting out and want to maintain your new blog on a tight budget, you'll have a different cost threshold than someone who has a blog that already generates a little bit of revenue, when it makes sense to opt for more premium expenses, such as faster web hosting, better plugins or WordPress blog themes, and stronger email marketing tools. A personal blog that you create on WordPress or one of the main free blog sites will have a completely different structure (and will have a different set of objectives, tools and structural decisions) than a blog created to generate income and become a real business. Whether you want to insert an affiliate notice at the top of all your blog posts or create a “Buy on Amazon” button, WordPress has a plugin for that.
Especially for anyone looking to build an online business, the cost of WordPress is minuscule compared to other platforms. This is a significant investment you'll make in the process of starting your own WordPress blog. It's definitely not a necessary expense when you start a blog, as you can design an attractive site with a free or affordable WordPress theme. While there are free blog sites (with no hosting required) that you can use to test how to write as an amateur blogger at a total cost of zero to very low, I can't recommend enough that new bloggers and beginners use the combination of WordPress with a Bluehost hosting plan.
They're also highly recommended by the creators of WordPress themselves, and they've built their business around offering reliable and affordable hosting plans to new bloggers. We'll show you the hidden costs of WordPress and see how you can set up a website for as little money as possible. If you're not yet familiar with WordPress plugins, a plugin is a small piece of software that adds new features to your blog. .
