How much does it cost to start a blog when you want your blogging to make a full-time income?
To be able to start building your blogging “business,” you need to at least have a domain name and a “good enough” hosting company to entrust your site to. Read on.
Can You Start A Blog For Free?
When you blog for fun, you can sign up for free to different platforms. The list of free blogging platforms just gets longer every few years. For starters, everything is “free.”
You go to a Site Builder, you press the one-click install, and voila - you now have a website in seconds or minutes.
But that is just the bare minimum. This is okay if you want to blog for fun. The cost starts when you want to have a decent income.
How Much Does It Cost To Start A Blog?
Blogging Cost Number 1: Domain Name
A domain name is basically your “brand.”
When you buy a domain name, that will be your business name. Google.com, Amazon.com, WordPress.org - these are domain names.
Those are their businesses’ names. Read this article if you need help on how to choose a domain name.
A new domain name can cost you around USD 14 for one year. Some companies offer lower costs for the first few years but resume to the original and more expensive price after a certain period of registration.
Other companies also have locked prices. Blogging cost is affordable if we are just talking about buying a domain name.
This is the first thing I recommend getting if you have a budget since it projects that you want your readers to take you seriously. First impression. It’s your brand.
In my opinion, the content looks more credible if it’s from a .com or a .org instead of just from a .whateverfreewebsite.com
A domain name is not a must to earn blogging money, but when you are “expanding your business,” you should invest in one.
Blogging Cost Number 2: Hosting Site
A hosting site or a web host is a company that provides the technologies and services so that your website will be viewed on the internet. Your blog will be stored in their special computers called “servers.”
Hosting your site on a budget-friendly start-up hosting plan is the next “cost” you need to take note of.
Free websites can be limited in functions. As you add on your content and your readers increase, your website speed can be limited, too. You don’t want your readers to leave your site just because it’s taking forever to load.
Hosting your website in a free platform also makes it vulnerable since you do not own the storage. You can lose access to your website anytime. You can learn more about it from here.
Blogging Cost Number 3: Training
Luckily, Google is free. You can google anything you want to learn about. The downside is, learning from different sources can lead to information overload.
What worked five years ago might already be an obsolete technique right now. You need to keep up with the latest legitimate information coming from a reliable source.
The Online Entrepreneur Certification Course from Wealthy Affiliate is the course I used to help me create a semi-passive income from my firsttimeparentguide.com website.
A passive income that helps to put food on our table may not sound much for other people, but it’s a good income I get without working on that website nowadays.
Tools Needed To Up Your Business
These most significant tools are some of the included features if you get your training from Wealthy Affiliate (i.e. if you host your site in Wealthy Affiliate.).
1. Jaaxy Lite
Jaaxy is a keyword research tool. Keywords are important to make good money from blogging. Jaaxy Lite will help you find long-tail keywords good for a month in under 2 minutes.
2. Site Comments
By answering questions in your comments section or engaging with your visitors' comments, you can add value to your existing content. Comments are contents, too!
Getting comments from the Site Comment platform of Wealthy Affiliate platform is a good start.
3. Site Support
This is one of the main reasons why I will not leave Wealthy Affiliate, despite having “cheaper” or free options. The technical support in Wealthy Affiliate is beyond amazing.
Any technical issues with your site are resolved in minutes! They are also active in helping and will respond to your messages in 5-10 minutes.
Conclusion: How Much Does It Cost To Set Up A Blog?
It’s free to start a blog and it doesn’t cost money store your contents online. You can even earn "extra" from third-party ads, depending on the free platform.
“Extra” is the keyword. How much? That we don’t know. It could be cents per month, two or three figures per year, it all depends on the following:
- Your knowledge on how to produce contents that make money.
- If you are hosted in a reliable platform.
- If your articles are found on top search results of search engines (and therefore has more audience).
In achieving these three factors, you need to have proper training. You need to use the right platform. You need to get updated information.
Wealthy Affiliate is a good investment. Whatever I’m blogging about on this site, they are just the tip the of the iceberg. You should have access to unlimited lessons from the original source.
