The Comments Writing Project - Blogging Expenses
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I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, as a lot of bloggers are starting group writing projects, memes and tag games. I really like group writing projects, like the Ultimate Guide To Productivity that Ben from Instigator Blog started some time ago. But I’m not a huge fan of memes, although I sometimes will participate in some.
What I have in mind is more like a “Comments Writing Project“. So instead of having to write a post on your own blog(s), you just have to write a comment on here, so even if your blog is not on the same topic as mine, you can still participate, since it doesn’t require you to write a post on your blog.
What I’m Looking For
Well, obviously since I named this a “Comments Writing Project - Blogging Expenses“, I’m looking for comments. But not only that, I’m looking for conversations. The topic of this one (if it proves to be somewhat popular, there’s probably gonna be more projects eventually) is “blogging expenses“.
What I’m looking for is people to discuss their blogging expenses. Where do you spend your money, on what, and how does it help your blog or make it better. Should you spend some money on a redesign, or not, or buy traffic or text link ads. What about hosting, do you prefer free hosting like blogspot or your own server.
You’re free to write just about anything for as long as it’s related to your blogging expenses, and how to reduce those expenses or get a better return on your investment, or similar stuff.
Or simply tell us what money you spend on your blog to make it a nicer place. Just make it so that it’ll be interesting to others, and engage in discussions. You can of course write something on your own blog, but it’s not a requirement like with other group writing projects. A comment (or many), or a nice discussion will do. :)
I’m Looking For Ideas Too!
You can start by leaving a comment below, and bookmark or check the “subscribe to comments” box there, and come back again so that you can read replies others left, and reply again and start a conversation, and we would all learn stuff from each other. Let’s make this a fun experiment, no bashing or anything of course :)
Any questions, feel free to ask in your comment(s), I’m sure I or someone will be able to answer you!
Take care!
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64 Responses to “The Comments Writing Project - Blogging Expenses”
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Interesting topic! Not something I’ve seen discussed a great deal, but I hope you get a lot of feedback.
My guess is that most people will say, “I spend very little.”
Everyone spends something on hosting, but after that, I doubt there’s much variation…but hopefully you get some worthwhile feedback, new ideas and a discussion going!
Hey Ben, thanx for replying!
Yeah I hope I’ll get a nice response. Reason I’m doing this is because there was a couple of group writing projects I chose not to join because it would’ve been really off-topic, and didn’t wanted to write a post on my blog, so hopefully since everyone can participate in this, it’ll get a good response :)
So Ben, what are your blogging expenses? Surely hosting, which is usual, but appart from that, do you spend some on advertisement like text links on other blogs, or traffic, or someone to design a blog, or to design banners or logos, or paid inclusions in directories and stuff like that?
On my part, I do spend very little, but still I experimented a little before, bought text links on some other blogs, and clicks on stumbleupon, more as an experiment than anything else.
;)
I spend about $15/ per month on hosting, and really I don’t spend much money at all, although if I had the resources I might purchase a review on Kumiko, or even Better John Chow’s site. Or another of the plethora of blogging blogs inbetween.
Hi Patrick, thanx for replying!
Yeah John is a little expensive, but if you have that money it sure would give nice exposure, Kumiko charges 50 bucks, which I think is fair.
What would be your expectations from those reviews? If you had the money and were looking for a blogger to hire to review your blog, would you do it to get more visitors/exposure, more rss subscribers, a spike in traffic? D’you think it’s worth it to spend $400 for a review?
hehe, I’m in “curiosity mode” right now :)
Hey Jon,
I like this idea. I think it has a lot of great potential for some real conversation. Since everything is in one place I think it will be easier to get people involved.
At the moment my hosting costs , internet costs, and the cost of my time are my only costs. I think Ben may be right about the general trend being the same for most of us. If your blog is pretty small and not making much money, I don’t expect you are going to spend much on improvements.
What has your experience been with the advertisements that you bought? Did you see a significant jump in traffic during your experiments? If we decided to try out a service what would you recommend?
Hey Andrew, good questions and thanx for replying! :)
One thing you wrote makes me wonder about something: “If your blog is pretty small and not making much money, I don’t expect you are going to spend much on improvements”
I agree with that! But when I think of it and try to see it from another angle, I think a “small blog” could actually benefit from spending a little money on improvements (say around a hundred bucks), even if the blog is not profitable yet, that could help kick start it and get the ball rolling.
As for my experience with buying links and advertisement, I have to say StumbleUpon rocks, at 5 cents a click, that’s 1000 targetted visitors for $25, I spent $50 on SU advertisement a while ago, and I have to say I was satisfied, although if you keep spending money and not getting any return it’s no good, so I stopped after a while, but still it helped increase my rss subscribers numbers. But I believe there are a ton of other ways to achieve that.
As for text links, I bought 2-3 on more popular blogs, spent around $125 in 1 month, and received about 4000 visitors in that month, which is not a lot considering you can get way more than that for free. :)
$20/month in hosting and that’s it.
I’ve never paid for anything else although I’ve thought about a few things, including StumbleUpon advertising.
I’ve also looked into professional blog design services. I’m a big fan of getting a professional blog design done, whether you can do it or you have to pay someone to do it.
Hey Ben, thanx!
Same here, $20/m for hosting.
Have you or anyone here ever paid for a profesional blog design? I’ve thought about it, but ended up modding a theme myself, which is free, just need some free time.
Our site hosting is $8 per month plus the annual domain name renewal, which is around $12, I think. But we were already doing both of these long before we started blogging…
So it seems I’m kinda in the minority here. I spend basically nothing on my blog - except for my time and energy, which is priceless! :-)
I’d say right now I’m hovering at the 75-100 visitors per day mark, I’m looking for more exposure, more rss subscribers would be great as well, also with the upcoming google pagerank update, I’m getting a little nervous, trying to get a good rank there as well.
I have a feeling a PR4 might be headed my way, at least that’s what I’m hoping for. If I get a PR5 I might have to throw out my underpants. So far I haven’t really made much in the way of Textlinkads, or Reviewme, but I’ve noticed they are a bit Page-rank reliant so hopefully that will give me a good monetary boost.
Hey Rob, weel time and energy is necessary I think :) more than spending money. If you have money to spend, it’s cool, but you still have to put in the efforts. Thanx for replying Rob! :)
John, that’s great! Maybe I can share a quick tip, getting involved (hard-core) in social networking sites can definitely raise your traffic and rss subscribers numbers, and also get links from other blogs and sites (sometimes with high PR, which is always welcome).
Goood luck on the PR update, getting a PR4 for a first update is already awesome, and a PR5 is just plain cool! You’re right most text-link sand review services will take the PR into account. I sold 3/4 of my text-link-ads links in no time after the update (still one available though) and I heard many bloggers who got a PR5 sold all their links in a very short amount of time, and are still getting requests. :)
I spend an ungodly amount on booze to give me inspiration.
hahaha, man! nice one!
I don’t drink often, except when in a “party with the band mates” context, I’m not sure it would give me more inspiration, but seeing your last Digg I think I’ll start drinking more lol
What a great idea Jonathan! Our blog is a group project so I’m not sure about the exacts on the expenses.
I know that we do have a Stumble Upon budget (not sure how much), and that we spend a small amount on a few banners on other blogs. We tried an expensive banner on a very high traffic blog but didn’t really see results for the $ so pulled it.
Another - and probably the best - expense was around $300 in podcast gear that we invested in for a contest prize. I think this has probably had the highest ROI of any money we’ve spent.
I must say I like Goldy’s response.. I don’t drink but if I did…
Hi Christine, thanx for replying! :)
The podcast gear thing is really nice! Although I didn’t not subscribe to your feed because of that, it probably helped CBG in getting more exposure that’s for sure. I’m thinking of doing something similar for that new blog (that should be all up and running in about a week!)
Talking about StumbleUpon, are you seeing nice results? Do you think the money spent on that is worth it?
I think it’s a really nice way to get targetted visitors to a blog, but just by being active in the community gets me more traffic. for free.
;)
Patrick, haha, well it seems to work for Goldy! :)
[…] It’s nice to see someone who is really good at making his comments more like a community. Check out his Comments Writing Project: “The Comments Writing Project - Blogging Expenses” […]
Happy Birthday Jonathan!
Hey Kendall, thanx a bunch man! :)
My only expense is $20 for hosting.
P.S. They say it’s your birthday… Happy Birthday!
Hi Angela, thanx a lot! :)
Have you ever tried buying text links or advertisement?
Great idea, Jonathan. It looks like you are already off to a good start.
I spend about $20 per month on hosting and have budgeted $25-$50 per month for advertising. I haven’t actually spent any money on advertising yet because I haven’t exhausted all the free methods yet. When it makes sense to pay for links, etc, I’ll start doing so.
Here are a few tips for spending your hosting dollars wisely:
- Pay your hosting in advance as far as you can afford.
You’ll get a much better deal if you can afford to pay your hosting fees annually instead of monthly. You can even save a few bucks a month if you pay quarterly. Try to stay away from paying monthly if you can.
- Don’t pay for options that should be free.
If your hosting provider is charging you extra for spam filtering, subdomains, or to park additional domains, it’s time to start looking for a new host. Over time, those little charges add up and affect your bottom line.
- Monitor your resource usage monthly to avoid additional charges.
Keep an eye on your bandwidth, disk space, and MySQL database size to avoid the $10-$20 per month charges if you exceed your limits. Once in a while you might exceed your bandwidth limits if you have a good month, but it if happens more than once, it’s time to think about upgrading your hosting package.
- Ask for a discount.
It never hurts to ask for a discount. You might be surprised at how many companies will give you a discount just because you asked for one. Try it now. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Nothing.
- Review your hosting plan once a year.
You should make sure your hosting plan is serving your needs and you are paying the least amount possible for quality service. Review your plan every year and compare the plans of other hosting companies to make sure you are getting the best deal. Also, if you decide to change your hosting provider, make sure you get a recommendation from someone you trust. There are some shady companies out there.
Hi Donovan! :)
I agree with paying yearly, and I will definitely do that eventually, since I switched to MediaTemple (which so far seems a good move), thing is I just want to make sure that hosting package and teh service is reliable, and then I’ll move to a yearly plan.
There one thing you wrote that makes me think about something else “ask for a discount”, I totally agree with that, it never hurts to ask. On the other hand if you can’t get a discount, you can always promote their services and that way get a discount on your monthly services or even months free, which is always cool. I used to do that with my old hosting company, it’s always welcome.
[…] But Jonathan at SmartWealthyRich.com is asking a different question: What are your blogging expenses? […]
I paid 142 for two years and a domain at Host Monster, plus a 50 rebate that should come back soon. That is 92 dollars for two years or $3.83 a month. Host Monster is is the same company and platform as BlueHost except a little cheaper. I have been pleasantly surprised with the hosting, and haven’t had any problems. If you go through an affiliate like myself, or many others out there they are usually willing to give you $30-50 bucks back when the rebate comes in.
I haven’t spent any other money, and I am in the process of doing a redesign myself. Having some programming skills helps cut the cost.
US$20/month for hosting. US$30 for 2 years hosting (I know I overpaid). I committed close to $20,000 on seminars partly so I can share with my readers what I have learnt.
Happy Rock, that’s a nice deal you got! :)
You’re right, having some design and coding skills help a ton when redesigning a site, that’s for sure.
Hi SJ, wow that is awesome! 20K! I really admire that, you surely got a lot out of those seminars, and now you’re passing on the knowledge on to your readers, awesome! :)
Happy Birthday Jon! I see you don’t even take a break on your birthday. It is always nice to see someone dedicated to things that are important to them. I hope you have a great day today.
Hey Andrew, thank you so much! :)
well I didn’t wanted to take a break ,cause I have a lot to do, especially today, but my internet was down for most of the day, so I kinda had to take a break, even if I didn’t want to. So I’m catching up on the comments and e-mails now hehe
I actually traded the re-design of my blog and web site for doing some PR for a web designer and I think it was worth it on both sides. My blog serves as my main point of introduction to my work and I think it took a graphic designer to find the right visual look.
I also spend about 150 a year to host and I count the time that I write on my primary blog as a great way to converse with like-minded folks that I might not otherwise come across because I home office. Those kind of connections are great!
Hi Nettie, hey that’s a great idea, no need to spend money when you know the right people, just exchange services. That’s a nice way to save money, especially since a complete redesign can be quite expensive depending on the designer.
The currency for blogs is not necessarily money. I think you’ll find that most bloggers don’t spend more cash than the cost of their domains and/or hosting.
The currency I’m talking about is links. Links from high page-ranking blogs is worth more to blog authors than the money they make from advertising (if that’s what they do). Some even pay for those links.
Taking the time to communicate with higher ranking blog authors is a form of blogging expense in itself because, as we all know, time is money.
I currently spend about $7 for a multi-domain hosting. I also spend a few bucks here or there, but not more than about $20 a month on playing with services like adwords and stumbleupon ads.
Hey RT! good point regarding the links, although for me, I’d say comments! :)
Thatedeguy, how many blogs do you host on $7? I’m curious, I have to hosting accounts, a main one and one that is now more for testing purposes, and it gets to around $40/month.
SU ads are great, althought you can get way more traffic for free just by being active on SU, but like RT said, time is money :)
Time would be the largest chunk. For which figuring this out is far more difficult than figuring out that my hosting is less than six a month, especially.
Lets say I want to have a salary of 150,000/yr, I then divide that by 52 and that comes out to 28885 /week. Divided by 40 gives me about $72 per hour.
If I am blogging for 2.5 hours a day, that comes out to $180 a day for time roughly.
That’s right, Adam. The time you use for writing can be expensive when you put it into perspective. A lot of people don’t realize how much their time is worth — this is possibly why “on-call” service technicians and consultants charge from $80.00 USD per hour and more.
RT has a great point here that sometimes the biggest investment into a blog is TIME. I can’t agree more that while most aren’t dishing out cash for TLA or Google AdWords, they are investing a significant amount of their day to blogging, tweaking, reading, commenting, etc…
Fortunate for some of us we love it :-D … and would do it all day if we could!
-Bryan the Blog Fanatic
Adam, humm, that’s the kinda thing that makes me think (I guess I’m the “analytical” personality type).
RT, I do realize how much my time is worth, it’s just not so easy to make others understand it hehe
Bryan, totally! hey wait! That’s actually what I do! :)
I spend 24.95 on hosting but i host 150 sites plus 500 subdomains. I just started something new today on my new site that i am using a bunch of new things to test and to publish the results so people learn from my mistakes.
In my case i am also trying something new which is rewarding my feed subscribers with free gifts for a limited time so only those that actually have my feed know when the free gift post was placed. This will be about $500 for the year.
The concept of this site is to see hoe quickly i can get a site from zero to hero.
Up to now
Today is the 3rd day of the site and preliminary results are as follow:
Indexed by Google in 48 hours
Technorati Rank: 342,102
Feed Subscribers 11
As you can see my Feed Subscribers is what i need to work on.
Goal 100 by Friday will see.
Visitors yesterday 395
Hey Vic, that’s a great idea, having a content and spending some money on prizes, your return on investment can be pretty good.
100 feed subscribers in less than a week, that’s a nice challenge. I left a comment on your blog by the way (hope it’ll help you reach that goal) :)
Jon,
I think the correct answer to how many sites I host on that $7 is “too many.” But the real count is 2 blogs, 1 directory, and about 5 other sites. The blogs are the only ones that get any traffic, so at the moment performance isn’t a big issue. If I were to start getting 1000’s of hits a day, I might think about moving elsewhere. MediaTemple’s Grid hosting is on my radar for that when the time comes.
As for SU, I do a little of both. I’m not horribly active, but I try and do a little bit every week and the SU ads just help out with it. (I have them set to $1 a day.)
Thatedeguy, that’s nice, $7 is kinda cheap for 8 sites. I find MediaTemple awesome so far, so would definitely recommend them.
That’s a nice method, $1 a day will probably not bring a lot of traffic everyday, but it’s constant, which I think is even better. And of course those posts can get stumbled by other bloggers, which can bring in even more traffic.
at the moment my greatest investment is time…eventually i’ll move to my own domain and have hosting costs as well, but i’m not ready to make that move just yet…i also plan give aways and contests…i like Vic’s idea of give aways for feed subscriptions a lot…definitely have to do that…
Hi Lisa, time is my biggest investment also. Give aways and contests are alway nice :)
I plan on doing that for that new blog, hopefully to generate some buzz around it :)
I spend $10 a month on hosting and so far $0 on advertising. I am going to be starting a PPC campaign, but I’m not quite sure how much I’ll spend (although the PPC campaign will be targeted towards my web design services, not really towards my blog).
Hi Steven, great idea, if you’re promoting services, like web design in your case. I’m not sure about PPC for blogs, as I think it wouuld probably be hard to turn a visitor that clicked on a sponsored ad in Google into a regular reader.
Any of you experimented with PPC before, either to promote your services or blogs?
As Lisa said, my greatest investment is time. My hosting is pretty much free because I already have a server for my webdesign/webdevelopment business, so adding another site doesn’t cost me anything because I have the disk space and bandwidth to spare.
I am pretty much able to do with it what I want using free software and plugins.. or hacks that I do myself. The only problem is time. Since I work on other projects and also am a single mom if a three year old, time is at a premium. So, my blog doesn’t look as good as it could and my posts sometimes aren’t as great as I like, but I’m not blogging for a living.. it’s really more of a fun thing for me.
If I get to a point that I need to spend $ on traffic or anything else then I would have to up my advertising to cover those costs. Right now my ads are relatively few.
I did spend about $25 recently because I had a problem with my blog that I couldn’t figure out myself and needed someone more familiar with the software to fix it for me. I didn’t have the time to dig through all the forums and manuals to try different things, so I paid to have someone who knew right away what was happening to do it for me. I think that’s the only money that I’ve spent on it so far.
Oh, I forgot the $10 bucks for the domain name registration. I guess I’ve spent $35 total.
Gerri, thanx for replying!
Time is definitely an investment, and to me it’s worth more than money. Spending $25 to have something fixed must have been a timesaver so I think it was money well-spent :)
One question though, does your blogging revenues cover the costs? $35 is not much, so if ads on your blog cover that you’re in business :)
After rebate, I spent $100 on hosting for two years, plus another $100 or so for . . . 9 domains & private registration, I think. (You’d be surprised how many ways people try to spell “MamaBlogga.”) Another $30-40 on books I’ve read for my personal site, and so far $100 on contest prizes, with another $30 coming next week.
Plus an average of, I’d say, around 1.5-2 hours/day.
Hi Jordan, hehe good point theres, getting similar domain names to make sure people typing it wrong still end up on your blog, or get the .net or .org versions, even .name if your name is your domain name.
Spending money to hold contests is definitely a good idea, since usually you get your money back, or at least more exposure and links.
Thanx for replying Jordan :)
I’m setting aside a small budget to have fliers printed. I’ll be putting them up on campus bulletin boards when I get back to school this fall, with hope that they’ll attract participation in my community art project blog.
Hello Adria, that is an awesome idea! One thing I find really interesting about your blog is it can appeal to non-bloggers as much as to bloggers, so spending some money to have fliers printed is definitely a good idea :)
Apart from domain and hosting I’m not spending any money. What I hope for the future is..
. Buy prizes of various values to give away (although when I get page rank I hope to blag these for free :) )
. Buy text links. Not sure whether to use the free voucher from TLA or buy directly from people on forums etc.
Hi April, prizes for contests and giveaways if a really good idea. As for the TLA free voucher, I would definitely take advantage of that, although buyng text links privately from bloggers is probably a better option, since TLA takes a huge cut.
Thanx for replying :)
I spend just over $20/month on my hosting, which manages multiple sites I run, some of which do make enough income to cover hosting costs, so essentially my blog’s cost is $0.
I do not do any advertising for my blog as it is fairly new, and I do not spend much time on it. This is something I hope to change, but I am currently having a new design done for the site, and don’t really want to start until I have the new design. (I want to leave a good first impression)
The design will cost me just under $100, so a small investment.
Hi Michael, hey that’s cool, if your revenues are greater than your hosting costs. $100 for a redesign is good, kinda cheap, it’s always a good investment ;)
Blogs are very inexpensive websites to run, which is one of the best parts of them. I just started recently (blogging, not running a site), so I just spend on hosting.
Where do you get your blog professionally designed at? I mightbe interested in getting one myself.
Hi Buy Websites,
I design my blogs myself! :)
I usually use a wordpress template, and customize it (a lot)
drop me an e-mail if you’d like me to design a blog for you :)
i am spending about $8 / month in hosting fees plus the nominal fees for the domain name which adds about $1 to the cost of maintenance ( once i launch additional blogs, will lower the costs / blog dramatically) i agree that the $$ should go into design costs since i am just not the creative type, though thereare thousands of high quality designs out there that can be had for free. i have found that no design works perfectly for my needs and wold be willing to pay a fe $$ for customization.
the objective of my blog to date is not so much about generating $$ as much as it is about providing relevant information to the broader entrepreneurial community and in turn expanding my network, contacts, and getting “tips and advice from others in similar situations. so far, the value delivered from each of these via the blog have been far more valuable than any type of ad revenue that could be generated from the site. my blog actually lead to a number of interviews with startup companies that i was interested in pursuing and tangible tactics for promotions of websites in general that will be used for my next gig. its hard to determine these intangibles of maintaining and supporting a blog, though i can tell you that just in the fees saved from having to subscibe to the various job boards, i have already made my money back and found a perfect position with a red hot startup, woome.com, which i otherwise could have never found without the blog.
Hi laruinbear, thanx a lot for replying! :)
I’m kind of in a similar situation, although I do make decent money from my blog (adsense, tla, affiliate programs) a good part of my income comes from contacts and gigs I got because of my blog, like design gigs or guest writing and things like that.
$8/month is pretty cheap, so that’s good :)
I’m now at around $40/month for hosting
Total expenses in $$: about $10/month. That’s all for hosting. Add about $150/year for the domain names I’ve registered that point to my three sites. (It’s so easy to get carried away with domain names.)
Total Expenses in Time: Unknown but quite a bit. I spend, on average, about 2 hours a day maintaining my blogs. Sometimes more. When I consider the fact that I could be doing work I actually get paid for, those 14-20 hours a week become very costly.
My costs have been limited to only a domain name at about $10 per month as I already had hosting with unlimited domains and sub domains.
If you are buying hosting for the first time it is worth considering whether you may need this feature. Even if you are not going to use extra domains/subdomains for another blog you may find them useful for other purposes. E.g. a personal/family site. I use Hostgator and have been very pleased with them.
Fantastico De Luxe is included in my hosting package, which allows for automatic installs of all sorts of web software. This is great if you are not so hot on doing this yourself and gives you the option of installing software to enhance your site e.g. forums, faq pages, link directories, photo albums etc.
I am moving my blog to my own server shortly and will then consider spending some money on paid submissions, advertising etc. I did not want to do this until I had established my blog, gained more experience and had time to research the best use of my cash. I will follow these comments with interest.
[…] I enjoy engaging in discussions and connect with other bloggers, well there will be more “comments writing projects” soon. This blog is sorta like an ongoing experiment, so I will keep doing just that, […]