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Are blogs free? Does it cost money to start a blog? These are my exact blogging expenses and what I spend money on to run my 7-figure blog!
This is all about every single thing that I spend money on to keep my blog afloat. I’m going over all business expenses since starting a blog over 5 years ago.
If you’re wondering about blog overhead, what it costs to keep a blog, what I spent during my first year blogging versus what I’m spending now, I’m revealing that and so much more!
I wanted to keep it a clear as possible since you really don’t need to have super high blogging expenses in the beginning (but be helpful with what I’m paying for now!), so let’s dive in.
This post is all about blogging expenses.
How much does it cost to start a blog?
The easiest way to begin is by looking at what I was spending on my blog in my first year. Like, every dollar was extremely thought out and intentional.
I only spent money on these four things —
- Hosting: I was doing my hosting through Bluehost and they were definitely the most affordable host when getting started. This is one of the things that I look back on and am SO glad I did it the way I did
- Website theme: my first theme was from 17th Avenue designs and I paid extra to have someone install the theme for me
- Courses: I am the biggest believer in purchasing courses! Honestly, you can save so much time learning from someone who already has it figured out versus learning it on your own
- Stock images: Using stock images is the best way to get quality images on your blog without having to worry about copyright/things like that
So that’s not really a lot! All that probably came to about $500 during that first year of blogging. Which sounds like a lot but if you think about that amount getting a whole business started… it’s really not that much…
Blogging overhead is incredibly low in general, but the blogging expenses in the beginning are microscopic.
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My Blogging Expenses Now
Here is everything we’re spending money on…
And remember, we’re expanding our business and going down a lot of different avenues. We’re investing in a house for the interior design business as well as tangible planners.
Since this doesn’t really relate to the blog at all, I’m leaving those expenses out and solely focusing on what our blogging expenses currently are.
List of My Blogging Expenses
- Salaries and wages: between my salary and the BSL teams wages (there’s 7 of us now), that’s definitely the biggest expense
- Email provider: we’re using ActiveCampaign now since our list has grown so large, which is great but also expensive
- Shopify store and apps: to sell our products and collect reviews
- Hosting: we’ve since moved to a different host solely to handle the amount of traffic we get to the site. TBH you don’t really need to switch hosts until you start getting heavy traffic
- ClickUp: the project management system that the team uses. Honestly, we SWEAR by this because it’s so good and keep the team completely organized. I’ve been using ClickUp since about 2017 and haven’t looked back since then
- Adobe programs: Illustrator and Photoshop are a big part of our social media and marketing strategy
- Canva: we use this to create our printables
- Google: we use both Email for all employees and Storage for saving out all our content
- Content expenses: any items that I need to create blog posts, social media posts, and miscellaneous objects/projects
- SEO tools: for writing blog posts, marketing, projections and research
- Teachable: this is what we host our courses on, we have three courses that are all hosted there
- Quickbooks: for all our accounting needs
- Stock images: while we don’t use this as much as when we began, we do still use stock photos occasionally
- Storage unit: a physical location to hold our planners, house decor, any items that can’t be kept in our office
- Accountant: all part of having a business!
- Lawyer: all part of having a business!
- Rent and utilities: the office space that BSL is headquartered out of
- Insurance: all part of having a business!
- Tangible products: this would be our planners and any items that we sell along side the planners
- TaxJar: what we use to ensure that all sales taxes are taken care of properly when a product is purchased
So were these blogging costs helpful?
Whew! That is the full list of all blogging expenses and everything we’re spending money on! Which if nothing else, is an interesting look into how expenses grow as your blog grows.
I’ve always thought it’s incredibly interesting to see what is going on behind the scenes.
I would definitely urge you to be cognizant of what you’re spending money on throughout all stages of your business. You definitely don’t need all these things in the beginning.
Spend the bare minimum to make sure you enjoy blogging first and you can be consistent.
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This post was all about blogging expenses.
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