I think this might be one of the most popular questions that we receive.
How much does it cost to start a blog?
I’m going to give you a terrible answer and then a great answer.
The terrible answer is that it depends.
The great answer takes a bit more than that.
What Do You Want?
I think this is the key question to ask when it comes to blogging. Yes, you can definitely make money blogging and there are a number of ways to do it, but some are going to require more money upfront than others.
That doesn’t make one better than the other, it just makes them different.
For example, if you start off blogging and want a premium theme then that will cost money. Maybe you want hosting that is guaranteed to never cause you problems then that is going to cost more than shared hosting.
Maybe you start off by creating a giant course and want to make sure you have upsells and order bumps on your sales funnel, then that’s going to cost.
Maybe you want to start an email list that can do some crazy things with segmentation and tagging. Guess what? That’s going to cost.
Don’t worry if you don’t know any of these things.
You’re just wondering what it takes to start a blog and I would say the initial costs are just two things:
- Hosting
- Domain name
Those are the essentials. If you’re thinking about blogging on a free platform then that is a problem right there because as you evolve with your blogging and your business, you’ll want to move off of a free platform (like blogspot) and use something that gives you more control.
Well guess what happens then?
You have to move all of your content and hope that you do SEO correctly enough that you keep on getting search engine traffic.
What about all of the links from social media? Well those might be lost if you can’t do a proper redirect of things.
Thankfully, hosting doesn’t have to cost that much.
Our host of choice for getting started is Siteground. They’re a hair bit more expensive than some of the cheaper hosting companies, but we believe in getting great customer support and great uptime.
That’s what Siteground provides.
Now, you could get a domain main $1-$4 cheaper (or sometimes free for the first year) when you get it through your web host, but we like to use Hover to register our domains.
Again, this isn’t us trying to get you to the most expensive places (.coms are like $12-$15 a year), this is us letting you know what we recommend.
So what do we have so far with costs?
- Hosting: $84/yr
- Domain: $15/yr
$99 / 12 months = $8.25 a month
I don’t think that’s too bad at all. Not when you consider that it’s really all you need to start an online business.
That’s it?
Seriously that’s it. However, we could add on a couple more things if you want.
Optional Additional Costs
Again, everything in this section is optional. I’ll be sure to cover why would we would include them with a blog that we’re starting with but that doesn’t mean you need them to succeed or grow with yours.
A Theme
The default WordPress themes are pretty solid. You could definitely get by with just using them.
We love and use GeneratePress for every single one of our sites. Yes, we have multiple and they all use GeneratePress.
There is a free version and a premium version. We go with the premium version, which is just $49 for unlimited sites, because we like the added features.
But you could get by just fine with the free version.
Email Hosting
Your web host will most likely provide you with an email address and email hosting for your blog, but we like to keep things professional so we use Gsuite.
It’s Google’s professional email solution for businesses and it allows you to use your domain name for your email.
It costs $6 per unique email address, but you can add aliases to a single email address and in that case $6 per month is all that you will pay.
How Much Does It Cost to Start a Blog on WordPress?
The one thing that you have to be careful of with WordPress is that you want to use the WordPress software and not the WordPress hosting.
The difference is that with WordPress hosting, you’re paying more of a premium and have less control over the whole experience.
Whenever you go through a host like Siteground, you’re using the WordPress software which allows you to do almost anything that you want.
Start a Blog for Cheap
If you want to dive deeper into the logistics of starting a blog then check out The Story of a Woman Who Learned How to Start a Blog for Cheap and also How to Start a Blog: A Simple 10-Step Plan for Blog Success.