From time to time I get questions from friends, family and sometimes strangers about what it takes to run a blog. Most assume it is a pretty simple affair, but of course it takes much more time, effort and money than you’d think. To an extent people are right that the overall idea of a blog is not too much work so long as you don’t consider anything you do on the site as ‘work’. You have to love doing it or you’ll never make it.
I suggest going the free route on a site like Blogger or WordPress to start so you can get a feel for what you are doing and find your voice. You’ll want to make sure you like doing it before investing any money into it. However, if you want to have a site more like this one that has a fully designed theme, unique domain name and hosting… you’ll need to make some monetary investments.
Luckily you can keep things pretty cheap here too. Domain names are about $15 from GoDaddy and you can find WordPress themes to choose from all over the internet and most are under $100. Installing them may be too hard to do yourself, but many places will do that as part of the cost. If you need that service then be sure to look for it.
Hosting is my only monthly cost, but is only $15/mo for me. There are lower priced options out there, but after some bad experiences elsewhere, I found MediaTemple servers to be the best out there. There support is great too, even though I have barely had to use it in years.
So for under $250/year you could start a real-deal blog and be off and running almost right away. It’s really not that much and if you draw pleasure from doing it, then it is worth every penny right?
