What have you paid for when it comes to your blogging?
One of the things that I hear a lot of people talk about when speaking about the virtues of blogging is that it has such low overheads and barriers to entry in terms of cost.
In many ways I agree with this – I look at my own experience of blogging and I started out with free blog platforms and hosting and apart from my internet access costs (which I was paying anyway) there were no other expenses for some time.
However the more serious you get with your blogging the more temptations there are to upgrade aspects of your blog and to pay for the privilege of doing so.
For me this has included paying for blog design, hosting, training/learning (books and courses), advertising (not much but I’ve experimented), blogging tools, new computer equipment etc.
My accountant still can’t believe how little I spend and all but begs me to create some more expenses to create some tax deductions.
It’s got me wondering what others pay for when it comes to their blogs? What sort of things have you spent money on to improve your blog? You don’t need to put figures on it (although you’re welcome to if you’d like) but it’d be interesting to know just how many bloggers do still do it on the smell of an oily rag.
I’ve only spent $5 on the domain name. Still using Blogger and my own modified templates for the hosting, so I’m not really spending anything at the moment.
We have several blogs that feature wine and foods of Mexico and Baja Real Estate.
Check with your accountant – but in our view – if we review a restaurant in our blog that is an expense. So, things you do for research on the blog are legitimate expenses.
RD
Just yesterday I switched from free Sitemeter to paid-for Sitemeter for the grand sum of $6.95 a month. What we can do with those additional stats is well worth paying for (IMHO).
And I’ve always believed that web hosting was worth paying for. The difference between free and a few dollars/pounds/euros a month is so little in money, and so much in service.
Zero. Already had my own domains, hosting and am now running wordpress. Only costs are some serious time put into my blog… I’m sure everyone has that cost though.
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Mike Harmon
I have been blogging (and podcasting) for more than 3 years –
Over that time, I’ve spent money on domains and hosting –
plus a computer upgrade and a new microphone for the podcast.
The true ‘cost’ of blogging cannot be summed up in ‘dollars and cents’ – The real ‘cost’ is measured in work-hours: thinking up ideas, creating posts, figuring out technical issues, answering emails, networking with other bloggers, etc.
NCN
Oh… and I bought ‘Blog Schmog’ but I wish I hadn’t bothered. :-D
You have to take into account the hours spent researching and writing, what are you worth? Overhead other than domain, upgrading computers and adding some bells and whistles is very low.
I spend very little in promoting my blog. I focus more on the content and getting higher results in the search engines. I also like to force my friends into reading my blog – instant traffic!
Mike, NCN and Chris all hit the nail on the head — with today’s very reasonable webhosting rates and domain registry (I remember Network Solution’s $70 per year charge), my main expense is the time I use to work on content development and blog networking, when I also need to use that time for my actual business, as well as family time.
This becomes an “opportunity cost” that currently is being paid for with less sleep :-)
I’ve spent $6.50 on my domain names, $5 a month for hosting and $5 for a package of WordPress themes. One of my cheaper ventures to say the least :)
I paid only for domain names and a refurbished server. I have free colocation (yep, I’m lucky). Beeing a geek :D I prefer self-hosting.
$10 in domain, free blog template (I did customized it a little), Blogger as platform. Im considering paying for bluehost hosting ($97yr unlimited domains) but right now until my blog get more traffic Im not going to spend too many on it.
Time.
And some small monthly fees.
Domain, hosting, advertising (AdWords, Bidvertiser, YMS)… around $250-300 so far which was already recovered thanks to AdSense, that you cannot name (ti, el… something) and a couple more. And time, of course.
$10 for the domain name. I have others pay for my hosting which is a big money saver. I’ve been doing web-design for a few years so I can do my own templates. The real expense is in time (though I find it’s been worth it) :)
Domain name less than $10 a year
Hosting less than $5 a month
and nothing!
Blog template, design…..I just won some from blog contests :)
Also make some money, get some free stuff from blog contests! No other expenses.
Zero so far (2 years, with 2 separate blogs).
But I seriously would have rather paid just to know that some things I tried for promotion would never pan out.
A few dollars here and there for advertising but that’s about it really. I don’t have an accountant (I prefer to get my hands dirty) but I’m in the same situation of finding expenses, don’t want to give the tax man too much!
Hmm. I bought all the domain names that relate to my site. So .net .com .org .info .. etc
I pay for monthly hosting.
Hmm. I like my wordpress (although it is annoying at times to use), and I made my own template. I like control over my site. If I had the choice, I would go back to hosting it on my own Linux Server at home, but since I get too many hits, it interrupts my internet connection at home. So paying 5 bucks a month for someone else to take care of the hosting is a better deal and less time from my part to secure my server.
I’ve spent $10 for my domain (last february, it has to renew soon). I use (mt) hosting, but because of one of their incidents where they gave credits to those affected (and their credit script failed, so the (mt) guys gave me even more credit), I haven’t paid my hosting bills out of my own pocket for a few months now. Usually I have to pay $20 a month for hosting. Soon enough, I’m going to get a custom theme.
I’ve only been blogging for two months and haven’t made any money yet. But I have spent a little: I experimented with WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad, and found Typepad to be far surperior (I know enough HTML to be dangerous and didn’t like WordPress’ limitations; I didn’t like Blogger’s limited templates, but didn’t want to mess with the CSS to create something unique), so I’m paying for Typepad. Plus my domain name.
I love blogging so far and will continue to do it even if I don’t make much money; for me it’s a great form of creative expression and a way to connect with people. It’s worth it for me as a pretty inexpensive hobby. If I make a ton of money off of it some day, icing on the cake!
Hi Darren – I don’t spend heaps on my blog as it’s quite new. In the past, I’ve not put things down that I should as a business expense – but I’m learning.
Now, you will need to check with your accountant – but sometimes you work in cafes – you might be networking there with other bloggers – corporate lunch?
Obviously – new digital cameras and anything associated with them, as you need them for your blog.
Don’t you have a home improvement blog. You show people how to blog about home improvement right? So I should imagine any improvements you do at home will be blogged about – you could probably put those down as research expenses or something.
Corporate gifts – you send presents to other bloggers and influential people – cases of wine and things.
Meetings/corporate brainstorming days – your wife is one of your blogging advisors right? So you could have an expensive dinner/lunch during one of these meetings and put it down as an expense.
Fuel/car allowance for when you are out and about doing research.
Even your travel abroad – if you are going for a conference or research.
If I think of anything else I will let you know. If the revenue are reading this, I’m not suggesting that Darren fiddles anything – but he may not have known that he could do some of these things and claim for them.
In theory, if blogging is your main source of revenue and you have a home office, you should be able to expense a percentage of your other house bills, such as heating, electricity, phone, etc.
Do you travel to meet people or for research purposes? Did you buy a camera to do videos?
It’s one of the best low-startup-cost businesses, when compared to people with hobbies like painting, where canvas, paint and other materials can break the bank before even getting started.
As others have said, it’s really the time and energy investment that’s most challenging to start off.
$8 / year for domain, $8 / month for hosting. That’s about it. Oh wait, I also spent $5 last week on StumbleUpon. Other than that, I’ve only spent time. A lot of it.
I’ve wasted more than $4,000 on domain names before reading the 21 immutable laws of branding. I didn’t considder the “say it in the hall” vs. “find it in a search” scenearios. I didn’t consider how alliteration helps for repeatability. I didn’t consider the emotional vs. just tech factors in the name.
The more painful the lessons, the better the learning sticks!
Live and learn ;)
I paid for domain names and web hosting — about £70 total (so far). In the past, I’ve had completely free “personal” blogs (using 20six and blogger) but I wanted to have a go at something more professional.
Ali
I paid 60 dollars for hosting last year. next year i will probably have to move up and pay 80-100 for the year(for more BW).
but last month i pulled in over 80 dollars from adsense alone. . .then again the site has only been up for 3 months. . .things could go either way
Since my blog is hosted on the same server as my hosting customers, the same domain name as the scripts I’m selling I virtually don’t have any exact costs for my blog.
/Andreas
And by the way just my opinion, Darren it would be great to put a forum in problogger.
Basically nothing …. since I do everything myself … yeah bit of web hosting and domain name costs … but they’re neglectable if I might say so …
Upfront was design, now it’s just the domain and hosting.
I bought a new laptop, mostly so that I could run both windows and Mac OS X software. After that, I spent about $50 on hosting per year, and use free stuff for the rest of my blogging. I also use X Site Pro for the rest of my web design, which cost me $200 or so if I recall.
All in all, very much worth it considering the income. :)
I spend $25/month on hosting + ~$9/year on domain names. All my sites run on WordPress.
At $25/month I spend $300/year for hosting. I’m thinking about switching to use wordpress.com for free. I’ve done minimal customization to themes – and I don’t really like any of them. No adsense is a big drawback – but I could just sell my own ads, I’ve started to do this already.
I beleive it would cost $25/year for custom domain and custom css upgrades at wordpress.com. I could host 12 domains there for the same price I’m paying right now. I don’t have 12 so I’d be saving some money, saving time on maintenance – but with the drawback of some customizability.
What to do????
Besides the things you mentioned, I’ve spent money on things such as graphic creation software. Pop up software. Little things like that.
But books are the biggest thing. I usually spend around $500+ on books each year to master my craft. Which are all tax deductible.
About 16 euro a year for the domain name and hosting, and way too much time. :)
Well you can try and use dedicated server for hosting and used fiail over option or host at multiple servers (in your case may be usa and austrailia??) so you will be paying around 300 a month..dont know if it would be stupid paying that much money just for hosting if there is no need but hey you can host all your sites there and u will have lotsss of space!!?
For me, the only expenses i really have are my hosting costs, (which i pay anyway), the price of my domain name, and some advertising. (about $50 per month).
I do like to upgrade my computer / laptop once per year though, and whenever i do, that, of course, goes down to expenses.
The basics, hosting, internet bill, a lone premium WP theme and that’s just about it. I still haven’t bought advertising for my blog yet though it’s something I really want to try later this year.
All in all, costs are well covered by my earnings, but still not enough to get me that MacBook. :P
Started out the same on a free WP platform. But had to pay $50 to expand the site memory as I use a fair number of photos on my site. Now that I’ve moved to a new site, I paid for transferring a URL, the server space, a theme for Joomla, and for a couple of extensions that were not free. But overall, it’s a very inexpensive medium. Hooray for open source!
@Four20
Wow 80 bucks off adsense in 3 months
I’ve been to your site about 100 times and never thought it’s only been up 3 months…
Guess apples were it’s at.
As for my expenses zip…(other than a parked domain I have waiting for me :)
I have mostly managed the back ends of other peoples blogs…
for free cause I guess i Like the geek part of blogging as much as the writing :)
I pay for advertising. Adwords to draw in new readers because I know my page sticks for it’s audience, and people subscribe to the RSS feed, and optin for the newsletter.
Apart from that, my time, is a big one although I don’t consider it “real” work, I love doing it.
Aweber – $19.95 a month
Hosting – $20 a month
Competitions – $40 a month
Adwords – $100+ a month
Other Advertising – $300 a month
That’s all I can think of!
Donovan
I pay $39 per month for hosting, $99 a year for a mailing list service, $50 a year to back up my hard drive at on off-site location, a small amount for domain names, and that’s about it.
Occasionally I’ll upgrade a camera, or piece of computer equipment, but I don’t really count those. I have a feeling I’d do that anyway.
The more I try to grow the blog, the more I see the need to upgrade equipment. I can see this being fairly expensive. But a good excuse to have a new pc!
I spend $107.95 a year for hosting, which includes the domain, unlimited mysql db’s, 350gb of space. That is my only cost, other then my time. Not bad. I don’t count computer equipement or ISP since that was bought before my latest venture.
Hosting: at least $20 a month.
Stock Photography: $60 every two months.
Custom Graphics: $200 each depending on the designer.
Themes: $300 a year.
Contests: $100 each contest.
Opportunity Cost: Growing daily.
The Provigil bills are killing me.
Aside from the domain names and misspelling variations, I paid $200 for my pig logo at SufficientThrust.com, and I pay $19.95/mo for an Aweber subscription. I pay $20/mo for web hosting for all my blogs collectively.
When I was at Startup Weekend Seattle this past weekend, a number of people made the very astute observation that while the event only “cost” $20 and we got a t-shirt, Moleskine, and free food for the entire weekend, we also put in more than 54 hours of our time, which made it a very costly event. Realistically, every hour I put into my blog is not an hour I would otherwise be billing for, but some billable hours are lost. That’s by and large the biggest expense, but I’ve experienced a great return-on-investment in terms of new ideas, connections, and clients.
About the only thing I’ve invested in besides hosting and domain names and the like (at least so far) is I paid for a translator plugin, as I thought it would add value to the site. And it has, especially for SEO purposes.
I really don’t foresee too many expenses, but then there is virtually no income so it all balances out in the end.
So far I only pay for my domain, however I am planing to invest soon in a custom design but that’s it.
I think, because of the niche of my blog, that advertising won’t help anyway.