Earlier this morning I was just sipping on my coffee thinking about paying my bills. Few minutes after dreading the part about writing out checks I got started thinking about how much money I have invested into starting a blog. I’m going to mention a few tips and some price’s. Now I understand that not everyone has a lot of money to invest into starting a self hosted WordPress blog and sometimes go with the “FREE” WordPress.com version that isn’t hosted on your own hosting account. Before you decide to create a self hosted blog, you need to think about how you will earn money from it. Let’s be Frank here, most bloggers don’t create blogs for fun but create a blog to earn some money while having fun blogging. You can have both folks. Just takes some hard work to make money from blogging.
Let’s start with the startup costs of creating a blog.
- Domain: If you don’t have a domain picked out yet to use for your blog then you can buy one through Godaddy. Godaddy is only good for buying and selling domains and not for hosting. Right now you can buy a dot com domain for $9.99
- Web Hosting: For a cheap and reliable web host, use HostGator. There shared hosting packages are great and I’d recommend the business package. I’ll talk about this later in the blog post but if you have genesis framework on your blog use Synthesis hosting. ($27 per month for cheapest package)
- WordPress: Now that you got domain and web hosting account, you need to download a copy of the self hosted WordPress software from the wordpress.org official site. Instructions are available and some web hosts have a 1 click install WordPress button. Be sure to check with your web host about this. This is FREE of course to download WordPress.
- Theme: WordPress’ default theme is nice and SEO friendly but it’s unattractive. I went for the gold and purchased a theme from Studio Press which included their Framework. Price for this was $79.95 which was a one time payment for lifetime upgrades and support. Search this blog for studiopress blog posts, I’ve written a lot about them. Here is a list of a few WordPress themes blogs. Premium Themes
Just by reviewing the costs it takes to start a blog up, it’s not cheap at all. I have not even mentioned the costs of marketing your blog. Yes, you can use free ways to promote your blog but sometimes that isn’t enough to get the targeted traffic that you are out to get. You don’t have to spend the money that I spent when I started this blog but prepare to invest a good amount of money for the startup costs.
Here is a summary of my startup costs:
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Domain: $9.99 per year
Hosting: $27 per month
StudioPress Theme/framework: $79.95 (One time Fee)
Marketing Costs: Varies
Total spent first day of setting up the blog with the above is $116.94. That’s cheap because I didn’t hire a theme developer to create me a custom theme that would cost over $1,000. I’m in this blogging for the long haul and know it isn’t going to be cheap. I still spend money on my blog’s behind the scenes stuff to try to make it a user-friendly and cool place to stop by.
Here is an estimate on what I pay yearly web hosting….
$324.00 I spend yearly for web hosting. The domain renewal fee is the same price as the registration fee I mentioned above. There is a reason I picked my current expensive web host. You can read the review I typed up about them on this blog below.
Specialized StudioPress Framework Hosting – Get Synthesis
I don’t want to scare you off from creating a self hosted WordPress blog with the startup costs I’ve mentioned above but prepare to invest money if you are truly interested in starting a quality blog from the start with the right web host, good theme/framework. If you pick a cheap host, your blog could end up with lots of downtime and that will kill your bounce rate and traffic since visitors may think you are not active in keeping your blog up or making it a great place to visit to read quality blog posts.
Happy blogging
Derek
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You actually make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this matter to
be actually something that I think I would never understand.
It seems too complex and very broad for me.
I’m looking forward for your next post, I’ll try to get the hang of it!
Just not trying to hide any details.