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Costs of running a blog

Andrii

Sep 29, 2018 • 3 min read

If you are just starting out blogging, this is one of the most important questions.

A lot of bloggers have this false thinking – I want to start a blog, IMMEDIATELY make money and PAY NOTHING.

This doesn’t happen in reality.

Especially, if you are just starting and don’t have any prior experience, so you will need to spend a lot of resources on learning, courses, etc.

This is an estimate breakdown for my affiliate travel blog – <a href=”https://www.museuly.com” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Museuly.com</a>
<h2>Domain</h2>
My price for museuly.com is <strong>$11.99 per year</strong>. It will increase for following years.

You can get a free domain with Bluehost hosting.

However, domain price can increase significantly. If you want a fancy domain – e.g. growth.com or amplify.com – price can go up to whooping $20-30K.

Cheapest ones are .info $2.99, .org $7.99 .eu $5.99 and others.

In my experience, it will be the <strong>biggest mistake </strong>(if you are just starting out) to spend thousands of dollars on your domain and brand. What matters is quality of your content.
<h2>Hosting</h2>
Cheapest option would be Bluehost – starts from <strong>$2.75 per month</strong> – but, it is only if you buy for 3-4 years and pay upfront. For 1 year price would be <strong>$7.95 per month</strong>.

If you want a more professional hosting – try wpengine. I’m using it for museuly, because it’s a bit faster. It’s more expensive – $50 per month. It includes SSL certificate, CDN option and good caching – which makes it fast.

Also, there is good staging environment and easy backup management.
<h3>That’s everything you need to start blogging.</h3>
<h1>Additional tools 1 (essentials)</h1>
<h2>Collect email subscribers</h2>
One of the most important parts of growing your blog traffic and sales is collecting emails. For that you will need lead flows, popups, forms for downloadables. For a start you go with absolutely free option – Mailchimp popups.

For Museuly, I’m using Convertful – I was able to purchase early-bird version for $20 per year.
<h2>Social media scheduling</h2>
You can use buffer or Hootsuite.

Buffer – $13 per month, Hootsuite – $18 per month.

Tailwing – pinterest scheduling – $17 per month.
<h1>Additional tools 2 (not that essential)</h1>
<h2>Content</h2>
You can spend some money on content from time to time. However, I recommend to try create a lot of content by yourself. Average ok quality article on fiverr would cost from $25 per 400-500 words – if you are lucky. Good 700-800 content piece can cost something like $80-$100 dollars.
<h2>Backlinks</h2>
If you want to speed up your Google traffic – you can get some backlinks. Buying backlinks on fiverr – not the best idea – most of them will disappear in 1 month and are of bad quality.

However, you can use some services to create local listings, submit your blog to directories, create some press-releases, etc. Average press-release starts from $50.
<h2>Outreach software</h2>
For building backlinks, you can use different tools – e.g. NinjaOutreach, Buzzstream. Their plans start from $35 per month.

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