Creating a website or blog is one of the most daunting tasks if you don’t know what you’re doing, but let’s put this in perspective. Although ultimately no one can verify this, it is estimated that there are more than 20 billion websites on the Internet today. That’s a lot of webmasters, huh? Making your own website is one of the easiest things to do, it just takes a little bit of effort to get the wheels in motion.
Before you start
Many people don’t understand that websites cost money to build and maintain. Don’t waste your time with free hosting and free “subdomains” (eg “mysite.yoursite.com”), because hardly anyone gets noticed without a small investment. Knowing this, you can expect to pay $8/year for your “.com” domain name. That’s pretty affordable! Web hosting will be your biggest expense. You can find free web hosts if you want to live a bit on the edge before you start seeing serious traffic and income. Once you switch to paid hosting for better service, you should expect to pay $4-$10 every month.
With these two costs in mind, that’s an average spend of $80 each year for your blog, not a very big investment considering the return you’ll soon get each month. Very expensive? Well, if you use free web hosting, which we’ll explore in Part 2, you could get out of this for as little as $6 a year… not bad!
Choose your type of blog
In the world of blogging, the “blogosphere” as many will call it, there will be two types of blogs: for-profit and non-profit. Some will tell you that a for-profit blog is “selling” or whatever…this is total nonsense. My blog is a for-profit blog, but guess what… I care about what I write, so this should be completely irrelevant! Even if you’re not just doing it for the money, if the money is part of it… you’re blogging for profit. There’s nothing against either side, it’s just important to have that mindset in place before you start.
Put on your thinking hat!
Whether you’re planning to make money from your blog or not, it’s going to be important that you find a “niche” or some sort of small, unique market of focus for your blog. Why? Well, having a competitive niche will get you the traffic you need, and having traffic should be just as important whether you’re making money or not.
So what is “niche” topics for your blog? As much as you don’t have to determine what your blog is about, you don’t want to blog about something that everyone else is already writing about. In effect, you want an area of focus that is not overcrowded, so that you can get the exposure and traffic that you want. You don’t need to be that specific yet, just something to separate you from the rest! For example, when I started I had a very saturated market in the “make money online” category… so I decided to pivot things towards a business blog. Now I don’t just have that plain old make money online blog, I have something unique that people will find different and special. I have the “young blogger” market, I have the “stock market” bent, and yet I have my main roots in making money. This is something that makes my site unique, and it is also something that generates traffic and RSS subscribers for me. So before you get started, make sure you have something special to grab attention from the get-go.
Tying It All Together: Sharpening Your Approach
Assuming that after hearing about the costs of having a blog and the problem of market saturation, you still want to create your own blog, let’s tie things together. What we want now, is a focused blog. It is one thing to have a blog about “golf”, but it would be much better to have a blog about “golf clubs”. You can blog about “baseball,” but you’ll get a much better audience if you choose to write about “New York Yankees baseball.” Where do I come from? You shouldn’t generalize if you’re creating a new blog and want to see results quickly. A more exact focus, or “focus focus,” can really increase your exposure.
Conclusion: Having the ambition to decide on starting a blog is great, but are you willing to invest the time and money to make it happen? You should expect to pay anywhere from $5 to $100 cash for a good blog, and you’ll want to focus on what you want to blog about before you start. Don’t try to do too much at once. It’s much better to start with a focused niche and gradually expand outward than to try to do everything at once.