Essential Blog Investment for Every Blogger (Spend Money To Make Money)

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Investment for Blogging
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Blogging has moved from simple day journaling to a professional way to earn money online. Now, ever serious blog has a blog business plan that requires lots of blog investment in order to make their blog popular and reachable to more audience.

There is a famous saying

“Money makes money.”

and it’s so true in the blogging field. For example, a quality web-design require good investment, and it helps in branding and earning more blog credibility.

For a  newbie blogger, who is limited in terms of money investment, it’s hard for them to decide what are the places they should invest on and that’s why I have come up with this post that will give you an idea about places where you should invest on your blog.

When we start blogging, reasons are different. It could be Money, Fame or using your blog as a personal diary. If you blog for any of first two reasons, you should continue reading this post and if you fall in the third one, blog about anything without worrying about anything.

Professional Blogging is no less than a business these days, and since people started taking it professionally and seriously, like every business, blogs also need investment.

This investment could be as low as 100$ or can be as high as 10000$. Depending on your business plan and insight. Here I’m outlining a few things which you should invest from day 1 and then when you start growing to make it a big deal.

Blog investment ideas that will help you grow your income:

Before making any blog investment, I would suggest you to set a budget. If you are a newbie blogger, you should set a target regarding $100-1000 year as an initial investment.

If your blog has already started making money, you can consider putting 50-60% of total income for expanding your blog. Well, it all depends upon your strategy, and for me, I usually spend 60% of total income into expanding my blog by investing on various online services and tools.

I will mention about all those tools at the end of this article, but let’s focus on new budding bloggers and places where you should work for your investment.

Web hosting + Domain name:

This is the first thing that you should work on. Never compromise on Hosting for money as cheap and unreliable Web hosting can give you a headache and sleepless night later on.

Go for Hosting, which is renowned and offers great support. Especially for bloggers who are using WordPress, make sure you use hosting with latest PHP (7) and MySQL.

Many hosting companies will try to offer you everything for almost free but don’t fall for such traps.  As a newbie, you can always start with shared hosting and there are many good options like BlueHost or SiteGround. My suggestion, say big “no” to free hosting as nothing in this world comes for free. Don’t you believe so?

Fact: ShoutMeLoud is paying $600/month for hosting on Kinsta hosting. This is price worth paying when your blog becomes your full-time income source. However, you don’t need to spend so much in the beginning.

Depending upon what stage of blogging you are in, you can pick one of these hostings:

  • Bluehost (Beginner)
  • SiteGround (Beginner)
  • WPEngine (Intermediate/Advanced)
  • Kinsta (Intermediate/Advanced)

Blog Design:

Responsive WordPress design
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The design of your blog is more like interior decoration of your house. Doesn’t matter how big your house is but if your house is not beautiful from inside, it may not look presentable. Also buying expensive stuff will not make your house look beautiful, you should place them in right place to make the most out of them.

Same is with Design of your blog. You should have a unique design of your blog with proper placement of the all essential elements for your blog.

I always advocate Premium Themes because they offer quality with support and flexibility to customize. A premium WordPress theme cost between 10-100$ depending on which theme you go for.

Suggest your theme wisely and make sure you put you unique theme from day 1. Later on, you can always enhance your theme by adding more features. For Premium Theme, You should look out:

If you have enough money to invest, I would suggest you opt for a custom design for your WordPress or any other platform. It helps in branding and making your blog look more credible and trustable. After all, custom design adds into the uniqueness of your blog.

SEO

If you are an old blogger, you know the basic of SEO, and you can skip this investment. But if you are a blogger who doesn’t know anything about SEO, I suggest get optimization of your blog done.

Blog SEO optimization are done two ways:

On Page SEO and off page SEO.  

On Page SEO is relatively cheap and affordable that you can do of your own using Yoast SEO plugin.  If not, on page SEO is a must have investment for any new blog, whereas off page SEO you should do after 5-10 posts are live on your blog.

This off page SEO is usually buying links and building backlinks for your blog. The idea is to make your blog rank higher for a particular keyword.

Here are various SEO tools that you will be needing in your journey:

Social Bookmarking marketing

Twitter, Facebook, Flipboard, Reddit, Stumble are popular Social bookmarking websites. There are companies which promote your stuff and make them viral on Social bookmarking sites.

Such sites promote stuff with reliable channel and investment are from 100-5000$. Depending upon your budget and links you would like to promote. You can select your plan wisely and start promotion of your blog. Though one requirement for such promotion is your article should be high quality and your blog design should be good.

None the less, Facebook is a great resource for Blogger and Fb itself can drive amazing traffic to your Website.

Though, to leverage the power of Facebook, you need to have a strong presence on Facebook in the form of a Facebook fan page. The key is to get more Fans and Facebook advertising is the best way to get targeted fans. You can set a minimum budget of 20-50$/month and start getting fans who are interested in your niche.

Here are some must have social media tools that you should start using from day one:

Your Team:

Most of the bloggers like to work alone but it’s always good to have a team as you can do more. Since Internet has no limits, you can expand your blogging business to any point.

Hire writers for your blog, blog maintenance guy and a creative designer. If possible have a team of 2-5 and try to cover all possible news in your niche. Make sure you don’t compromise with the quality of your posts.

  • Websites to hire freelance writers:  Freelancer

Apart from all the above-mentioned points you should also consider investing on your logo+banner+ Gravatar which will help you a lot in blog branding. Another investment scope could be branding your social profiles like Twitter, Facebook.

Many other investments you can do later stage once your blog brand starts becoming popular. All the above-mentioned investment you should consider when you are planning to start a serious blog or taking blog as your full-time investment.

For me, I invest 19$ for Aweber & about $255 on Convertkit. Apart from these expenses, I pay salary to people who are working on our blog as part-time & full-time.

Do let us know what other essential blog investment you can think of while considering blogging as a serious business?

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

23 thoughts on “Essential Blog Investment for Every Blogger (Spend Money To Make Money)”

  1. Hasan

    Excellent ways to invest money wisely on the blogs. 🙂 I am planning to follow these tips. I have already out sourced content part of my niche blogs (paying $100 a month, which is making me $1500 profit a month). Now looking forward to expand the team.

  2. Kemi

    Informative post. I didn’t realize that one needs seo optimization for YouTube. Thank you.

  3. Anis

    Hi Harsh, this is a very nice and informative article, I have been searching the internet for how much should I expect to invest to make a blog that will start to make money within few months and where should I invest, I found your article and I like it very much, I want to start a blog but dont have time to write but I can do all the promotions, can you suggest me a cheap way to get good content in a regular basis for my blog? I dont care, I can start a blog about any niche since Im not going to write anything myself, so I would like to go for the most profitable and unique niche, What do you suggest me to do? Waiting for your response!
    Thank you in advance
    Anis.

  4. Zyaan Mohammed

    I am a new emerging blogger, the only blog I follow and which is the only useful blog. I was about waste my money on unnecessary things. Now I m bit aware of how to where to invest money and the all thanks goes to Harsh Sir. Thank you so much sir. Keep up the good work.

  5. Ahmer Faraz

    Excellent post Harsh.

    I am starting to become a big fan of yours. The way you present ideas honestly and in detail is superb.

    All investment ideas presented above are noted by me and I will try to implement them on my blog as I can afford.

    I am a new blogger, still learning, reading your and other articles on net to understand blogging.

    Thanks again.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Hey Ahmer,

      I appreciate that.Do share your feedback once you have tried and tested all the ideas. Happy Blogging!

      1. richa soni

        hey hi harsh sir
        In this post , you have suggested the best of the things which i can use in my blog and i also want to use them but the issue with me is the money . i am a post graduate student . i really want to develop a blog of self help so that i am able to reach as many people as i can to hlp them genuinely . so what are the thing i can little compromise on due to less money . like it wont effect much . if this kind of process is not good for the blof than i will definitely after my studies . take up a job and than start investing onto it . pls let me know your views on it

  6. salek ahmed

    Well and essential post for blogger who are serious about it. In my case, I would pay $8 for domain and $5 for logo that’s it. My blog is build on blogspot. But now I would like to shift my blog in wordpress. I will prepare for it.

  7. Deepak

    Brother Harsh You Article is very informative, But when its comes to students from Asian countries who wanna start a niche blog its hard for them to even invest around 100$.
    Suppose if I will invest on hosting & domain + on the theme then there are few plugins which are very important and help you to earn money for eg. Semrush but its very expensive for any newbie blogger.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Deepak
      You can use SEMRUSH free for 14 days, and my suggestion is to do all the research in first 14 days, and later cancel the subscription. Once you start making decent income from your blog & can afford the tool, buy it then.

  8. Amaan

    My investment for my blog was like 50$. And now getting like 45% of the amount you getting.

    Covered up my investment via Affiliate with one post itself. Learned SEO from this BLOG only(Yoast Seo).

    Will opt for your BLOGGING CONSULTANCY in near future. Thank you !

  9. Athul

    Wow gr8. Most difficult part is promotion on social bookmarking sites. I hate to tell friends to click and promote it. It would be better there is a new revolution system of social bookmarking

  10. invoice format

    Blogging is becoming popular day by day. It is a source of information as well as income. Writing a good and attractive blog is an art. It demands creativity. But like any other thing there are few basic rules and fundamental principles to be followed for better out put. You have amply covered them in this article. Nice work.

  11. Julie

    This has been a very significant post indeed about blogging. I’ve acquired a lot of helpful information from your article. Thank you for sharing such relevant topic with us.

  12. gregw

    Nice post. Thanks.
    The challenge is good content posted at regular intervals, but like someone mentioned, there is a need for traffic to read the content.
    It all depends on how much of your blogging is directed toward business, whether or not it will be as important as a business.
    If you are only seeking a small income from contextual ads then it is not so important. If you are selling a product of your own or an affiliate product then it is much more important.
    Organic search engine traffic is important and can be a high percentage of your readership, but after your site ages and the content increases this may be reduced to a small percentage, with regular readers returning for the newer content.
    Bookmarking on social media sites is important, but so is utilizing press release sites, classified ad sites, and directories.
    All of these combined will bring in traffic and links to your site, or posts on your site.
    After everything is fine-tuned, the content is ultimately what keeps the site afloat and the rankings elevated.
    So it begins with content and ends with content with all of the other elements sandwiched between.

  13. Jens P. Berget

    I have invested in a blog and hosting, and I also use AWeber. I did have my own unique design, until I had to “start all over” (a long story). Now I’m using the thesis theme like you, but I don’t have my unique design. I’m considering hiring someone to create a header, and that might be all it takes to make it unique (because I’m satisfied with the theme).

    I have never done any SEO on my blog, but I understand that it’s important (I get offers all the time from people that want to help me). And I never do a lot of submissions to social networking sites, mostly twitter.

    I do close to everything myself, hence I consider your #5, finding a team to be my biggest challenge. It sounds awesome to have people to help you promote and share your passion, and just having them around.

  14. Bob Upton

    I like your post. I agree that blogging is a business. I just recently started blogging on TheHackedLife.Com and must say, the hardest part of blogging is getting your content in front of people. I think once you have good content, like this site, SEO is then the most important thing. How good is a post if no one reads it?

  15. Mani Viswanathan

    Investing in creating a Social Media base is very important. Even if u post high quality posts but there is no reach to those posts, then u loose some traffic there. But it’s not always necessary as organic traffic could cover it up.

  16. Sheila

    What an awesome blog! You’ve taught me significant blogging information from this article. I appreciate you for taking the effort to extend this topic so comprehensively. I look forward to learning more on your upcoming posts. Thanks.

  17. Arif Nezami

    “Blogging is no less than a business”
    – totally agreed….

    1. Ajith Edassery

      I must add that the disagreement is to the statement ‘blogging is no less than a business’. Agree to the other points when it comes to good hosting/platform selection etc.

  18. Vijay

    I like this post very much. Eespecially the last one “Your Team” is very interesting. Hats off to you Harsh 🙂

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Thanks Vijay 🙂

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