Make a Blogging Budget for Time and Money

Discover how adopting a mindset of running an online business and setting a budget for both time and money will help you become a profitable blogger faster.

You’ve Got a Lot to Learn

Most new bloggers start out one of two ways – neither of which is rooted in reality.

They either 

• just set up a site on their own and start creating content
• Or they buy a course that teaches how to set up a site and start creating content

I believe most seasoned bloggers would agree that those two things need to come last, not first, in the process.

Learn How Sites Make Money

If you plan to make money with your site, the first thing to learn is how sites make money.

Popular ways to make money from a site include:

• Affiliate selling the products of others
• Selling your own physical product
• Selling your expertise
• Selling ad space on your site

Learn How to Gain Audience

To sell anything you need folks to see it on your site.

That takes marketing – to tell folks your site exists and what they’ll find there.

And that takes knowing who would be interested in what you’re selling and where you can put it in front of them online.

That will take learning all you can about the social platforms where your audience hangs out and how to make the most of it to drive traffic to your site.

It will also take creating ways for them to continue following you by subscribing to something – like on that platform and/or your newsletter.

Learn How to Write Online Copy

Once you know who your perfect avatar is – which is the ideal person you want to visit your site, you need to tell your story in a way that they are both educated and entertained while reading it.

That includes formatting to make it scanable while making your most important points eye-catching.

Plus, you want your copy to get found and ranked by search engines so that folks looking for the kind of info you create can easily find it.

Writing for both readers and search is a balancing act.

Learn How to Do Photojournalism

If you’re creating any type of how-to post, you may need to include pictures of the steps.

Just like online copy, those photos need to be both educational and entertaining.

That may include a photography class.

But it will definitely include learning a good image app to make images for both your site and any online platform where you want to market to your audience.

Now You’re Ready to Create a Site

Once you know how you want to make money, and how to attract and keep an audience to extract an income from, you’re ready to build your site.

Choosing a Domain

Getting a clear picture of the kind of content you will be creating will help you better define what domain you want to use for your site, as it will describe the type of site it is and what can be found on it.

And, now that you have a clear picture of where your target audience lives online, you can better research the names of sites/people they already follow.

In other words, you are now better prepared to chose a domain and see if it is available everywhere you want to use it.

Hosting, WordPress, Speed, and Security

Before you jump into creating a theme and actually building the look of the site, you’ll want to get educated on where the site files will be hosted.

All hosts are not the same.

And some are cheap going in, but will actually delay your site growth because they are slow and don’t allow you to secure your site properly.

Security and speed go hand in hand.

READ: What is Managed Hosting? for the different host types.

On top of that, you will want to take a beginner’s course to learn best practices with WordPress itself.

And then you’ll want to learn the content editor, which is called Gutenberg.

The minute you point your domain to your new host and do the initial WordPress installation, your site is launched, meaning that bots and humans can find it on the internet.

Too many new site owners don’t consider their site officially “launched” until they remove the Coming Soon plugin, or tell folks about it.

But the fact is that bad bots will start chewing up that site and/or try to hack it the minute it becomes available.

This is why it is so critically important that you have your site setup securely from minute 1 and that you learn how to maintain it properly.

Blowing the Whole Budget on the Theme

All of the above takes time and money.

But what I see all too often are newbie bloggers skimping on those things and then blowing every bit of time and money they have for the project on designing their own theme.

Not one second you spend on theme design makes you any money!

Newbies want a WOW factor with their theme.

Seasoned site owners want a super minimalistic theme that does not compete with their content or images and loads fast.

Let that sink in.

Bloggers who make $10k/mo spend very little money or time on theme design.

They want fast, clean themes with splashes of their brand colors.

Learn to Mine the Data

Blogging can become a hamster wheel of content creation.

You run your butt off but are getting nowhere.

This is why analytics are your best friend.

See what topics are hot in your niche and write about those.

Dive into your analytics to see how your posts are performing.

My highest earning clients spend 90% of their time data mining and 10% of their time creating well-researched content that performs outstandingly from day 1 because it gets noticed by readers and search engines immediately.

Budget Money and Time for Success

Blogging success is about way more than blogging.

How are you spending your money and time?

If it’s 90% on the content creation hamster wheel, maybe get off that long enough to learn all of the other stuff that contributes to your success.

Those things are a better spend of your money too!