Are you ready to make the jump and start a niche site or a blog? Good for you, you are well on your way! Today I want to talk about some of the costs associated with running a website, and help you figure out what will work for you based on your budget. We’ll cover everything from the basics to more advanced tools and features to help you grow.
How Much Does it Cost to Start a Blog?
The good news is it doesn’t cost much at all to start a blog, you can get started for less than $100 for your first year! There are, however things that may make sense to invest more money in if you have it. Let’s start with the basics of what you need to get started, and go from there.
The Basic Blog
To start a blog, you need two basic things: a domain and WordPress hosting.
There are many different WordPress hosting companies out there, but when it comes to the basics for bloggers who are just getting started I love SiteGround. SiteGround makes it easy to get started, and can be your one stop shop. You can also pay for your SiteGround hosting and your domain with a pre-paid credit card like a Visa gift card. SiteGround is very fast web hosting with great service, at a fantastic value.
From here, you can use one of the themes that are included with WordPress, or the free version of GeneratePress, which is a fast theme.
The total cost for your first year on SiteGround for hosting is $47.88. If you also purchase a domain from them and enable domain privacy (which you should), it is $77.87. By the time it is time to renew everything, you should be making some money from your blog, and it won’t feel as painful as the initial investment.
This is the best, cheapest way to get started.
The next thing you should focus on is content, content, content.
Total Cost for Domain + Privacy + Hosting for first year: $77.87
WordPress Upgrades
If your budget is slightly larger, there are a few things that can make your life a little easier when it comes to managing your WordPress blog.
GeneratePress Premium comes with access to their site library, which makes designing a very nice, fast blog very easy. It costs 59 dollars per year.
The next thing I would consider is a paid social media plugin. Paid social media plugins have the ability to allow you to embed extra pinterest images in your site very quickly and easily. This is totally a time saving play. I use SocialWarfare and Mediavine Grow Social Pro and like them both.
If you plan on using Amazon Affiliates, once you are in the program, and Amazon Affiliate plugin is a huge time saver. I’ve used several plugins, and for beginners I recommend AmaLinks Pro. This is one of the easiest plugins to use. I really also do like the AAWP plugin, because it is easy to work with their short codes, which is something I like to also do in a programatic fashion to build out the perfect Amazon links and images for my blog posts.
| Plugin | Price |
| GeneratePress Premium | $59 per year or $249 lifetime (500 sites) |
| SocialWarfare | $29 single site, $89 up to 5 sites |
| Mediavine Grow Social Pro | $34 per site |
| AmaLinks Pro | $67 single site, $197 up to 25 sites |
| AAWP | $54 single site, $141 for 3 sites |
Your Next Investments
What I’ve outline are the basics to get started with you blog from a technical perspective. Of course, content is probably the biggest thing to consider when you start your blog. When it comes to content, there are a few things that make sense to invest in if you can pull it off.
Keyword research tools are a huge time saver when it comes to planning out your content. My favorite is KWFinder and it is the first keyword tool I ever paid for when I started my first niche site. Total game changer. I had been doing all of my SEO with free tools, and while I could get the job done, it was just so much faster with a high quality tool. The great thing about KWFinder is that it includes access to many more Magnools tools.
Next is something called Frase.io. Frase is an AI driven platform that helps you outline content to rank in search engines well. It analyzes competitors and tells you what topic to include in your blog posts. I love this tool and it has been a game changer as well, I started using it about a year ago. It also has the ability to WRITE CONTENT for you. I have this feature on my plan, but I haven’t played much with it yet.
You are on your way when it comes getting off the ground with your first niche site or blog. You don’t need to boil the ocean as you are getting started – the best thing you can do for yourself is to focus on your content!
The truth is you can start your blog for well under $100 dollars. From there, it is up to you to decide if you want to spend more money, and what you want to spend it on. For me, I usually pick things that I know will save time, and make blogging easier.
