You know you should be blogging. You’ve heard stats like small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than the ones who don’t. But you keep putting it off because it seems like such a big undertaking.
Blogging will pay off, but I have to put in a lot of time and money in right now, right? Wrong. Today’s modern blogging and digital marketing tools are aimed at small business owners who don’t have the time or resources to invest heavily in their blog.
Today we will show you how to start your blog and fill it for a year for less than $80.00. And you can literally start today!
1. Pick a Platform
The first thing you’re going to do is choose your blogging platform.
In most cases, that means WordPress, the simple and robust tool that most small business owners trust. Even many of the world’s biggest brands use WordPress.
Yes, you could go with something like Medium or a free website builder like Wix. However, those platforms can help you publish a blog, but do almost nothing else for you. These tools make it hard to customize your blog for search engine optimization (SEO) or conversion rate optimization (CRO).
They also make it nearly impossible to monetize your actual blog.
2. Find a Reliable Host
This is another area where you do not want to go with a free or cheap provider. You can get any number of WordPress hosting plans for about $70.00, which is absolutely nothing when compared to the value you get.
If you go with a cheap host, your blog is more likely to go offline and experience downtime. However, the bigger issue is that cheap hosts won’t give you fast load times. Slow load speeds kill SEO and your would-be readers are likely to bounce if your page takes a few seconds too long to load.
3. Find a Year’s Worth of Content
What are you going to write about? You can pretty much put together a year’s plan for content that will actually get found by search engines and readers for 7 dollars, and you can do it in less than 7 days.
Use content planning and keyword research tools like ahrefs or SEMrush to find the short and longtail keywords that your customers are looking for right now.
You can either get a free trial or a “7 days for $7.00” introductory offer. Believe us when we say that one week is more than enough time to research enough keywords for you to plan a year’s worth of blog topics and keywords.
Create titles from those keywords and put them on a 12-month plan. Now you’ve got a year’s plan for a whopping investment of $7.00.
See how easy that was? You spent less than $80.00 and you now have everything you need to create a blog that will be noticed by both Google and readers. You’ve got a great platform, a reliable host and the keywords to target exactly what your customers are searching for.
Happy writing!
