Sometimes when I get together with my business owning friends I feel terribly guilty.
The reason – I have no substantial overheads or expenses.
When we get together my friends bemoan the costs of renting properties, paying staff, the cost of advertising and having to find the money to pay suppliers. I tend to be pretty quiet at these times in the conversations but there comes a time when someone will turn to me and ask what my biggest expense is….
I never know quite what to say.
Blogging is a very low overhead business in comparison to the huge setup costs of other businesses.
Some of my actual personal expenses include:
- ISP (internet acess) – not much more than a fairly normal household internet plan
- Blog Hosting and Domains– most of mine is through b5media so in actual fact I don’t pay for this but previously it wasn’t more than a few hundred dollars a year. There is also a small yearly fee for domain names.
- Computer Running Costs – I update every year or two
- Accountant fees – probably my largest expense but not astronomical
- Design/Techical Support – once again I’m lucky in that I now have a network covering a lot of this but there are a few expenses here
- Travel – over the last year or so this has increased, however the majority of this is paid for by those behind the conferences that I speak at. There are a few incidentals though
- Periodicals and Subscriptions – I do subscribe to a few periodicals in the different industries that I write about
- Blog Tools – there are a couple of online services that I pay a yearly fee for (for example MyBlogLog’s stats which I think are $20 or so per year).
- Office Costs – there are a few miscellaneous costs in running an office. Phone, fax, printing paper etc – although having an online business means a lot of this is minimized.
This list refers to my own expenses as a blogger. Of course these days some of them are picked up by the network I belong to (and co-own) however I think most would be pretty similar to what other bloggers face in their expenses. All in all these costs would total a few thousand dollars a year (and I could cut this back probably by sticking with computers a little longer).
The only other real cost in blogging is the time it takes. Really this is the main ‘expense’. In a sense it’s an opportunity cost in that I could be using that time in some other way (family, friends, relaxation or…. a ‘real job’).
Have I forgotten anything? What other expenses do bloggers have? How much do your yearly blog expenses add up to?
update: I probably should have mentioned that in my earlier days my expenses were considerably less than ‘a few thousand a year’.
For example there are options for blogging like wordpress.com which cut out the hosting and domain expenses – I used my old 10 year old computer on dialup – I didn’t travel – I read the magazines that I now subscribe to in the library, I had a friend design my blogs (and even did a little of it myself), another friend helped with the tech/back end etc
