Everything I Spend Money on For My 6-Figure Blog – Blogging Expenses

hi guys today I will show you every single thing that I spend money on to run my six figure blogging business I'll show you my expenses now on the fifth year of blogging and will also compare it to what I spent in my first year when I just started the Vlog of course in the first year I spent way less money on my blog because I wasn't really making money until the end of the first year and now my blog is a real business that has expenses and I think you should spend money on a growing business and I have some notes Here on my laptop for a full list of expenses that I have right now but we should start with the first year so I started the blog as a side hustle while I was still working full time and when you start a blog it's very common to Think Through very carefully think through everything that you need to purchase even if it's just ten dollars it's something that you spend before you made anything from that blog so I totally get it when people hesitate before buying anything so in the first year of vlogging I spent money on the three main things that you cannot Skip it's your blog hosting and the main name and a WordPress theme and you know when I look back I think that's one thing that I've done right and if my friends or relatives come to me these days and they ask me what should I do to start a blog I just send them straight away to this page I can actually do after I edit the videos screen share so you can see what I mean it's a page with step-by-step guide on how I started my blog so I'll give you a link to that post in the description below and if you are new to all of this you can sign up to my free seven day course I will send you a new lesson with a video every day to your inbox the link to the course will be down there in the description as well so check this once we're done with this today's video there are many things that you can do wrong on those first steps that will cost you a lot of money and maybe effort to fix it later like you could start a blog on weeks or on a free platform and you would have something like anastasia.blogspot.com and it might seem like it's cheaper or maybe sometimes it's easier to start this way but the problem is that you cannot really make money with it or grow a Blog if you started it this wrong way eventually you will have to move it and pay even more for some technical help because it is harder to move an existing blog with content than to start a self-hosted WordPress site from scratch so that's what I did I started a Blog on Bluehost the free plan included a free domain name for the first year they have a 24 7 chat support and if you just use my link anastasiablobber.com Bluehost you will even get a special discount for it and all the links from my list of expenses or the tools that I will mention here they will be as well in the description below the video so you can start with this free WordPress theme for example as store has a free theme but you can also upgrade it a switch to a paid version later I I've used on my blogs Astra theme and X theme these two things so far so in the first year it was just hosting and my website theme also in that very first year of blogging it was important to take some courses on blogging I took a course as my actually is my birthday gift in the first year but I think it does help you to make more money your first money with it faster because you just avoid some mistakes you can spend your time and effort only on the things that can really help you grow faster and if your blog requires a lot of photos then maybe even in the first year you could go with one of the stock photo sites but there is actually there's plenty of free photo stock sites I used as a less expensive option in the first year pre-pick.com but there is also deposit photos that one is more expensive you can use it later just a quick tip for you that could save you a lot of money if you use canva it's a free graphic design tool they have a stock Library even on that forever free plan you can start it at anastasiablobby.com canva so I use canva to create all my pins for Pinterest and if you use their Pro Plan which is like about 12 dollars a month you will get access to the full library of their stock photos and videos so that's like you you're getting two different software in in one package for One Price It's a graphic design tool and it's a photo stock inside I think I probably spend about 400 in that first year of blogging and it did feel like a lot to me too because I didn't make any money with the blog initially but these expenses were spread over the 12 months the first 12 months and if you think about it it's your investment to start a business now if you know any other businesses you can start and run for the whole year with just a few hundred dollars let me know know in the comments I want to know what kind of business is on your mind the honest truth about blogging is that your expenses will always be very low compared to any other businesses because I've been doing this for five years and even now the expenses are still low when you look at the income and compare these numbers okay now let's get into what I am spending on the blog now and I'll try to go through this list as fast as possible so that you don't get bored so the first thing is salaries and expenses on the part-time workers as well so we have basically two people on a salary in my company it's my husband and I we both work on this full-time but I also have two more people who work with me part-time then I also spend money on a managed WordPress hosting so I don't use any more glucose that was just for the beginners and once your site starts getting a lot of traffic you need to think about a managed WordPress costing and for this I'm I'm now using a campaign when you use a cold stand web and they they promised a really high Google site speed and they delivered 90 plus score for my sites so I'm really happy with them and I used to have on my side some paid plugins that also helped with the site speed but I now I don't have to use them anymore because this managed WordPress hosting is replacing all these additional plugins for me now for my email provider I use convertkit for over four years now it's pretty costly when your list gets bigger but when you start you can even use it on the pre-plan they even have a forever free plan but when your list is relatively small once it starts growing it can become costly but again I like convertkit because you get Integrations with all the different other tools which I will mention a little bit later and also very very reliable and they keep growing and improving the tools so I've been staying with them and I don't think that I'm gonna switch to any other provider anytime soon the next thing I use canva Pro it's as I mentioned for creating pins and creating any kind of Graphics that I need for my Pinterest account but also for the blog itself as well then I use Tailwind scheduler to schedule all my pins on Pinte