Blogging is like building a business and unlike any other businesses, it needs some regular cash flow to keep it going. Running a blog needs more than monetary commitments. It needs time, research, technical support and most of all, your special attention.
In this article I will outline how much does it costs to run a blog. I will also share how much money I am spending to maintain this blog.
Contents
Free vs Paid Blogging Platforms
Blogging can be done for free but when it comes to building a business and making it worthwhile, you will have to invest some money on a more reliable and professional platform.
I don’t suggest a free blog platform because all the free platforms are owned by someone else and not you.
Free blog platforms include:
- Blogger
- WordPress.com
- Medium
- Tumblr
- Medium
When it comes to credibility in online business, hosting on a free site will make you look casual. Free platforms lack many of the top website features. However if you are short on money and you just want to test out the waters of blogging, then feel free to use a free provider.
If you use WordPress.com, you will then be charged for various paid upgrades like using your own domain name. It’s better to use the Self Hosted version when you are paying.
Self Hosted WordPress Sites
The best platform for a blog+website is wordpress found at wordpress.org.
This is an open source content management system that installs on your server.
For the rest of this article, I will be focusing on WordPress.org self hosted platform, since this is one platform all the pro bloggers use.
Web Hosting & Domain
Since we are going to have a “Self Hosted” blog. We need to arrange our own web hosting account. There are many good web hosting providers out there and almost all of them support WordPress.
Web hosting is an essential monthly expense. They cost around $10 per month. If you pay for a year, you can save some money upfront.
Two of the hosting providers I recommend is:
- BlueHost (have to pay yearly)
- HostGator (you can pay monthly)
A web hosting alone will not be good, you also gonna need your own domain name. When you sign up for any of the web hosting above, you can either purchase one from them.
If you get the domain from your hosting company, then there is nothing much to worry about. But a domain usually costs around $10-15 per year. I suggest you take advantage of some of the deals on GoDaddy or NameCheap
Please note that, these are entry level shared hosting plans, ideal for new blogs. For bigger blogs, you will need more. I will discuss more about this at the end of this post.
Premium Theme for Your Blog
After you have your blog up and running with WordPress, you wanna make it look beautiful. WordPress has themes to change the design of your blog. It has thousands of free themes to choose from. You can also get the BlogKori theme to use on your blog.
But if you want something more unique and eye catching, you have to get a premium theme.
Some of the premium themes I have used personally and on my client sites include:
- Thesis Theme
- Genesis Theme + Skin
- Divi Theme
Hiring a Blog Designer
To make a unique design for your blog, you may need to hire a freelance blog designer to save you some time doing it yourself. Freelancers are everywhere and varies in the fees they charge.
You can find a freelancer from Fiverr for as low as $50 to give you a unique design for your blog.
You can also find some top tier designers who charge from $500-1,000 and up for designs. It all depends on your budget and expectations.
Top bloggers like to delegate the design part of their blog to an expert.
Since I am a web designer and developer, I designed all my blogs and didn’t had to hire someone.
Email Marketing
When the design part has been sorted out you will need a system to capture leads. Lots of people will visit your blog and then never come back. Email marketing software will be the ideal tool to capture them.
BlogKori uses Aweber to manage the email marketing. Here are 3 of my recommended email marketing solutions:
- Aweber email marketing ($19/mo)
- Omnisend (Free, standard plan starts from $16/mo)
- MailChimp (Free upto 2,000 emails, $10/mo)
- Feedburner email subscriptions (Free & no auto responders)
What’s The Total?
- Web hosting: $10/month or $120 a year
- Domain name: $15/year
- Email marketing: $20/month or $240 a year
- Premium theme: $80
- Hiring a web designer/developer (if you don’t want to DIY): $50-$1,000+
So that’s a rough estimate of the costs of running a blog (excluding the time and labor you will put yourself for content)
Advanced Costs for Bigger Blogs with Large Audience
All these estimates are for a new blog with less than 1,000 visitors a day. But what about for blogs like Problogger or Pat Flynn’s blog?
You see, a blog with thousands of visits a day needs much more web hosting juice. A regular shared hosting plan wont just cut it.
My friend Ryan Biddulph’s blog Blogging from Paradise recently seen a tipping point where his web hosting account just can’t keep up with the amount of blog visitors anymore.
Large blogs need dedicated web hosting account to manage the heavy load.
For a large blog with large following, it will need larger tier web hosting, email auto-responder and other media hosting fees.
What makes blogging a great online business is because you can really help people and make money from it. The entry level of blogging is very low meaning that it is much cheaper than starting a real business.
After you are up and running with your blog, it’s time to make some money from it. Feel free to check out my other posts where I have talked about blog monetization.
Let us continue the discussion, how much do you spend/planning to spend on blogging? How much resources are available to you for your next blogging venture?
Simple and great article, Thank you very much
Glad that you like it! Thanks for the comment!
Nice post. I guess your blog is pretty expensive. 🙂
LOL Yes! If I had to pay myself then I had to pay a good amount for the design.
Nice post tamal bro. You are rocking….Thanks for share this helpful post. I am just your big casual fan…:)
Ohh thanks a lot man. But why casual? Be a fulltime fan!
Hi Tamal,
Good to see you shared your costs. But what about your earnings from this blog? We want to know it 😉 . And thanks for the post!
I have shared my blog earnings before, but sometimes I feel that sharing one’s earnings is not appealing for all. Maybe it will be encouraging for some but will be discouraging for others. I have older pages with earnings, I will make them visible again. Also in the next I will post more regular posts on traffic and earning figures.
Excellent article Tamal.
Thank you for all the information.
Catherine
You are welcome Cath and happy to see you on the comments + in the newsletter!
My blog is in free platform, I will invest on it after a few months. Your article is awesome in a word. Thanks
Thanks a lot my dear friend, I appreciate it. Don’t worry if it is free, go up step by step.
Very clean and clear content from how to start a blog to launch a blog into market and also how to manage a blog after launching. Thank you for sharing with clear content. Thanks once again for sharing.
You are welcome
Hello tamal bro,
Just launched my Internet marketing blog. Do you think IM niche is worth trying for beginners?
Well why not? It is one of the biggest niches online. You can share tips from a newbie perspective for the newbies, just like I started. You never learn everything in IM so we all are kinda newbie.
Nice design with Thesis.. Got a new idea to host downloadable files with amazon s3. Thanks Bro. I read your several articles earlier, saw your blog and freelancing business both growing for last couple of years. Do you think that nationality has an effect on the online reputation and trustworthiness, specially for affiliate marketing where people need to trust your words?
Hello Taswir, welcome to BlogKori. Nationality doesn’t matters. See the best blogger in the world is from Australia. Indians are working in top positions of Intel, IBM, Apple and Microsoft. It is your personality and skill, that’s all. People may have assumptions like hey this is a Bangladeshi, and they are not reliable people. But after working with me, people realize the difference.
Yap bro u r right. But u r thinking from freelancing perspective where the buyer has the chance to work with you after knowing your nationality. But when you are blogging and specially in affiliate marketing, buyer doesn’t has the chance to work with you directly. That time people know you by nationality only and reliability and trust might become a very good factor, isn’t it
So what is your point?