How Much Does It Cost to Start a Blog?

I’ve been blogging for awhile now, and I notice a huge difference from 5 years ago to now. Back then, it was so much easier. You could open your blog through blogger.com for free,  post daily or 5 times during the week, get a lot of comments of your blog posts and it was so much easier to people find you. Because Blogger was from Google SEO wasn’t that big of a deal.

Today, if you want to start blogging you really need to invest in order to make your blog stand out.  There are a lot of blogs out there, so it’s not that easy for people to find you and you need more than a blog now. You need a Youtube Channel, a newsletter, and active social media profiles. Sorry, but it’s too much. You are investing so much money on your blog on domain, hosting, theme, social media schedulers, photography and etc, that it really makes me mad that some brands wants to work for free when you’re investing so much money and your time on it.

Investing in your blog is like investing in yourself. If you want to make it professional, you really need to do your best and invest.  That’s why I thought it would be nice to make a list of how much you would invest if you want to open your blog and run it successfully!

Here’s a list of things to consider when starting your blog:

1. Domain name:  $10/year through GoDaddy.
2. Web Hosting: This depends on where you’re going to do it. I was happy with Netfirms. It was $60 yearly, but the last two years, they changed their policies and now it’s $130. DOUBLE! I’m afraid to change to another hosting platform. I’ve read amazing things about Bluehost. It’s $3.95 per month with domain included. GoDaddy is $10 yearly too.
3. Newsletter: MailChimp is free until you get 2,000 subscribers and then you will be paying $20 per month. I read that the majority of bloggers used Converkit which is $24 yearly. I just started my newsletter using MailChimp but I’ve read so many good reviews about Converkit that I might change to it later on.
4. Theme: You want your blog to stand out, so you want a pretty blog. Themes are around $50 dlls-$100. My favorite theme place are: Station Seven, BluChic, & Creative Market.
5. Social Media Managment:  There are too many tools out there, but these ones are my favorites: MeetEdgar ($49/month) , SproutSocial ($99/month), and Hootsuite ($19/month)
6. Pinterest: Pinterest is a good source of blog traffic, so you want to invest in it. Tailwind is a good scheduler and it would take maybe a hour to schedule your whole week. It’s $14 per month. You can get a free month trial here.
7. Photography: This all depends on your photograher. They can charge you from $75 per hour to $160 per hour. So you have an idea, in an hour I can do 3-4 outfits depending on how fast you’re changing clothes. But also it’s good idea for you to invest in a camera, because sometimes it’s better if you take your flat lays or travel shots. A good camera and lens to start blogging are Canon EOS Rebel T71 with wifi included, lightweight and perfect to travel with a 50 mm 1.8 lens. This is my personal favorite.
8. Creative Cloud: You would need Photoshop and Lightroom to edit your pictures or to do cool collages. The photograhy package is $12/month or you can get the whole Creative Cloud for $50/month.

Obviously this is just an idea of what to invest. You can save some money by doing your own social media management, or try out free trials to see what you like most. You can get a friend to take your photos for free or maybe even collaborate and do a swap with a photographer. In the end, you want to invest smartly and remember, everything will be worth it.

What are your favorite blogging apps and tools? Let me know in the comments below!