Where To Spend Money For Your Blog Growth?

Spend money to make money
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I am a strong believer in the saying “Money makes money“. You need to spend money to make money.

Whether we are talking about blogging or about any other business, when you spend money to enhance your business in any way, you are making an investment in that business.

We all agree that blogging can be a lucrative business. But if you are not doing anything to promote your blog’s growth, then you are not doing justification to your blog as a business.

In order to start a blog, only a few minor initial investments are necessary.

However, if you wish to take your blog to the next level, you need to invest more time, more effort and indeed more money.

A couple of years ago when ShoutMeLoud was really starting to grow, I had money to invest toward the further growth of my blog, but I had no idea where to start.

I had a handful of money, and I wanted to invest it in the most beneficial ways possible.

This was two years ago, and since that time I have invested money into my blogging enterprise on a daily basis. Some of these investments continue to give me excellent returns (ROI) .

If you are a hard-working blogger looking to take your blog to the next level, here are a few ideas which will help you to realize that dream:

Spend money to make money:

Your blog’s design and theme:

I have always focused on the importance of obtaining the best design for a blog.

There are many good WordPress premium theme clubs such as Astra theme or Genesis which offer great yet inexpensive designs. The problem with these designs, however, is that they are used on hundreds of blogs. Choosing a “premium” theme does not mean that you have a unique design.

I have a license to almost all of the premium theme clubs, but I also know that the best design is a custom design.

A customized theme allows you to give a unique identity to your blog. Regardless of how amazing your content is, a unique and well-designed blog is important.

Without an impressive blog design, your content cannot be appreciated and thus becomes useless. Think of it like this:  good music playing on very bad speakers.

You can certainly hire a WordPress theme designer to get a custom design. My recommendation would be to buy a license of the Genesis  and hire someone to develop a custom skin for you. This would be costlier but it definitely worth your investment.

If you not up for that big of investment, no problem. You can grab one of the hand-picked premium Genesis skins (Unique design for Genesis framework) that works pretty well with various niche blogs.

Your branding:

Spend money on Blog branding
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The best thing about brands is the fact that they are easy to recall. When it comes to recommending a good blog design in terms of brand, SocialMedia Examiner is my go-to example. They have a unique logo, and an avatar that is clear and memorable.

You can hire a designer to create a logo and a custom avatar, a YouTube page background, a Facebook cover and a Twitter background to give a unique identity to your blog and your social media profiles.

You can always find cost-effective designers using freelancing websites, or if you have the budget you can hire a media branding company that is local to you.

This is one area that I am still working on – the pimping out of the ShoutMeLoud social media profiles.

Search engine optimization:

This is one area in which your investment is crucial. It doesn’t matter how great your content is, you need to work on the SEO of your blog to improve the search engine visibility.

I have previously shared how WordPress is not SEO friendly, and wrote this detailed DIY WordPress SEO tutorial.  But if you are not a technically-minded person, it may be a good idea to hire someone to optimize your blog for search engines.

Surely your blog can rank higher with great content, but your blog’s SEO needs to be up to the mark in order for search engines to find that great content.  If you are a solopreneur blogger, you need to spend time learning good SEO, and implement it on your blog.

You can also hire a freelance writer to guest post on your blog, creating targeted backlinks for you.

Bear in mind that SEO is a slow process, and you need to start now in order to see results in the future.

Hire quality writers:

When you go to freelancing websites, you can always find many reasonable writers who are willing to do research and write content for you. However, the best content comes from people who are experienced, particularly in your niche.

It is worth investing a little more money to hire authors who can write content based on their own experience. I have done it quite a few times myself, and results are usually excellent. Problogger jobs portal is a good place to start your search for a good freelance writer.

Good webhosting to hold your traffic:

So far you have done everything you can to contribute to your blog’s growth, and now it’s time to work on sustaining the traffic.

A good, reliable web hosting company will ensure that your blog doesn’t go down in times of high/peak traffic.

When I started ShoutMeLoud, I started with Dreamhost and then moved to Hostgator > Linode > Knownhost > WPEngine > Cloudways & at this time we are hosted on Kinsta hosting (January 2020)

It may take time to find your perfect hosting company, but you should only use hosting companies that are reliable and will not let your blog down, especially at times of maximum exposure.

I recommend that you use Bluehost or SiteGround for shared hosting, for managed WordPress hosting Kinsta or WPEngine  (From my personal experiences)

Get an office:

It may sound off topic, but if you are a professional blogger like I am and you work from home, the time will come when you need to have an office of your own.

You can certainly set up an office at home, but when you can afford outside office space, it will serve you well to have one. A good office space helps you to be punctual and productive while adding a professional touch to your blogging career.

I have an office at home, and at times I would from co-working space. This could be a good solution if you don’t want to deal with headache of maintaining an office.

There are various pros and cons to working at home but here are guides to help you get through it.

Grow your team:

Being a professional blogger is fun, but you can’t do it all alone. Developing a team in tandem with your growth is important.

Just imagine the benefits of having an editor proofreading and finalizing your posts for you, a designer doing the creative work, a developer making changes that keep your blog running efficiently and smoothly, and an SEO specialist constantly working on the search engine optimization of your blog. All of this becomes necessary when you want to move to the next level.

I have hired people to work with me from my home office, but after a while, I realized that employees also look for growth opportunities. That’s when I began my search for outside office space, a process which I will address further in a future article.

For now, you can start by hiring a virtual assistant or some freelancers online. In time you will find having an in-house team to be both cost-effective and very good for productivity.  This is growth you can look forward to in the future!

These are some of the areas in which you can consider investing some money toward your blog’s growth.  With that growth you will find other opportunities worth your investment.

Let me know where you invest your money in an effort to take your blog to the next level.

If you find this information useful, do feel free to share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

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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.

17 thoughts on “Where To Spend Money For Your Blog Growth?”

  1. Kade

    For now i just using premium theme, not custom theme for my blog. And i also want to make a brand ( logo, avatar etc ) for my blog. But i don’t have enough budget yet, can i do it next time, or should i do it from the first time i run the blog…

    What you think?

  2. himanshu

    Hey Harsh great post indeed do let share with us the pictures of your new office.

  3. puneet

    thats the best things one can do for his blog ,, opening an office for my blog is just like a dream for me but m sure that i will fulfill it one day

  4. Sunita

    I am stick with hostgator since 2 years but now I need vps for my forum. what do you think about myhosting.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Sunita
      Move only when you need to… Hostgator is a good and reliable hosting..And till the time they are handling your blog traffic without any hiccups, stick to them…

  5. Shanker Bakshi

    Great Read!!!
    I’ll also suggest to spend some money on stuff like MAX CDN or on some good VPS host to speed up loading time of blog, as that’s what making the difference right now. 🙂

  6. Shubhashish Shukla

    I must now act to collect a team for my blog. Thanks for that ‘in-house team’ it moved me to take steps. Thanks again!

  7. philip

    you need to spend some money fixing up your content and making it english friendly 😉 im guessing it will cost you around 5-10K at the end of the day, but i bet you will see SEO improvements as well as user experience improvements. Every post I read has a massive amount of gramatical errors

  8. sahil

    Really good article, and Harsh All the best for setting up new office.
    Its sounds really great 🙂

  9. Utkarsh

    I wonder, how much time will it take for me to become earn enough to hire someone to do the work for me. Anyway, I try my best. These were some excellent points that you mentioned.

  10. Sarbjit Singh

    Hello Harsh,
    For my blog i am using shared web hosting but from last 2 months i’m not satisfy with, mostly gets down. I’m thankful to cloudflare.
    I thinking to move my blog to VPS. Please guide me to select right VPS.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Sarbjit
      How much traffic you are getting and who is your current shared hosting company? And are you using any cache plugin?

      1. Sarbjit Singh

        @Harsh
        Traffic varies from 7k-10k week. I am hosting my site with Hostrivers and i think they are already resellers. I had used cached plugins but not now coz they doesn’t made any difference when used with cloudflare.

        1. Harsh Agrawal

          @Sarbji
          7-10K is a traffic, that could be easily handle by a good shared hosting. I have recently written this article:
          http://wpfreesetup.com/how-to-speed-up-wordpress-website/
          It will help you to speed up your blog.. Check what’s causing load on your server. Instead of moving to VPS, I would recommend try Hostgator or Bluehost, as both can handle good traffic. I have a good experience of holding up to 20k per day traffic on both of these servers.

  11. Radha Krishna

    Those are some worthy tips harsh. Even I am planning to hire a designer for my tech blog. I do have a separate home office but have some disturbances all the time. Hope I move to an outside office soon…Please update your new office pics (setup) once you found the suitable one.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Radha
      For now, you can also try working form cafe. I have been doing it for a while, and it’s a good change, and will increase your creativity. I will surely post the pictures, once we set it up. 🙂

      1. Prashoon Jha

        Hello Harsh..
        I have started reading your blogs. And I wanted to ask you that is it good to spend money on domain name and hosting now only or shall I first use free WordPress and get some experience on it. Pls suggest. I am willing to earn some money from my blog..Thanks..

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