Most of us start our blogs as a hobby; maybe something to pass the time or a way to capture our family memories. Often they can develop into something else, our jobs or a way to make us some extra money. Either way, whether your blog is a major part of your income or a much loved hobby, there are some things that you really should invest in.
You would be lucky to take up any hobby and not have to buy the equipment to enable you to take part and you certainly couldn’t run a business without making some investments.
What’s worth spending your money on?
Try to focus on what you think you need, don’t be seduced by things other bloggers are spending their money on. It might work for them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it will do the same for you. So keep your own needs in mind.
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A custom domain
Having a custom domain will make your blog look much more professional to the outside world. It will give the impression to readers and PRs that you are serious about your blog. I think back in the day mine was £19, so it won’t break the bank either.
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Going self-hosted
If you want to earn from your blog then you will need to go self-hosted. It can seem a bit scary, but it really isn’t that difficult to make the change and most hosting companies will do it for you if you will be using them for your hosting. Moving to self-hosted also gives you much more control over the theme you use, the design options and you can add amazing plug-ins to your blog, which will help you more than you can imagine. There are various hosting companies and basic hosting is usually around £2.99 per month. I’m currently with TSO Host and have never had any serious issues. I pay for Pro hosting, which is £4.99 per month.
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Branding
Your branding ties together your blog, social media platforms and any other places you have a profile on. Branding may start with your logo, but it goes much further than that. The colours, fonts and images also make up your branding and in an ideal world you want people to be able to catch a glimpse of a header or of a profile and know it’s your brand. That immediate recognition, which will go a long way to making your brand seem more professional, authoritative and cohesive. You can create your own headers in Canva or Picmonkey, play around with colour schemes and fonts or get a designer on board to create something for you. It needn’t cost the earth. I paid an illustrator on Fiverr to do my current logo/header text and it was around $8.
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Blog design/theme
The design of your blog is such an important factor. It can make the difference between someone landing on your blog and bouncing straight off or hanging around and becoming a regular reader. It’s better to go with a theme you can customise, so that you can truly make the design unique to your blog. This will also strengthen your branding further. You can either tinker with it yourself or hire someone to do it for you. However, lots of blogs have a really user-friendly front-end, so you don’t necessarily need lots of coding knowledge to have a go.
5. Schedulers to help you boost your social media presence
As well as growing your blog, you need to simultaneously grow your social profiles, so they support each other. This growth will make brands sit up and take notice. Most bloggers use multiple social platforms and it can be exhausting, impossible even, to keep on top of them all. I always say you have to be on them all, but you don’t have to win them all. I pick one to devote lots of time to (whichever I want to grow at that current time), then I will work on another two to a lesser extent and tick over the others (mainly with auto-posting).
You need to share your posts on social media to make sure your content is getting the attention it deserves. However, scheduling all of your content can be so time consuming. I think you need to spend you time on networks to engage, but let a scheduler take the strain with the scheduling and distributing your posts. After all it doesn’t make any difference if you do this manually or if a scheduler does it for you. The engagement is where it’s at, so save your time to do that.
It’s false economy not to use schedulers, for the reason that they are a few pounds/dollars a week. They will save you hours of inputing and will free up so much time; so you have more time to earn, write content or just be with your family. At the moment I pay for Social Oomph*, Grum, Board Booster and Tailwind, they seriously save me hours.
So, if you are starting to think about where to invest some cash, these are the areas that I would recommend injecting even a small amount of money into. Once you have these five areas under control, the landscape of your blog and how it’s perceived will change immeasurably for the better.
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