A personal blog can boost your online business, host a writing portfolio or just showcase your thoughts and stories.
Whatever your reason for starting a blog, you’re faced with an overwhelming number of options to do it.
You don’t want to go the cheap route and wind up with an amateur-looking blog.
And you don’t want to waste money on something you could get for free — or do yourself.
For four years, I ran a blog that helped me make money, land freelance writing gigs and build an audience. I spent less than $500 in the lifetime of the blog.
Here are some of the best tools I’ve discovered to help you blog on a budget — without looking like a beginner.
How to Create a Website With Squarespace
In recent years, Squarespace has become a new favorite all-in-one publishing platform.
It offers a beautiful, professional-looking, easy to manage website.
With Squarespace, you can manage everything you need in one place: hosting, domain, theme, design and functionality.
Squarespace offers the right balance between professional design, autonomy and simplicity at a reasonable price.
You can have a Squarespace website up and running for $12 a month, or $96 a year– including your blog, design, domain and even one item to sell.
Look Professional Using WordPress
WordPress is another all-in-one option.
Like Squarespace, it allows you to choose your domain, theme and manage your blog in one place.
Unlike Squarespace, a basic WordPress blog is free.
But sticking with the all-free version is an amateur move — and it shows.
If you want to keep your WordPress blog easy to manage but step up your style, these are affordable ways to do it:
Buy a Custom Domain
It costs $18 a year to own a domain and integrate it to WordPress.
You can buy directly through WordPress, but I recommend owning your domain through a domain registrar like GoDaddy for flexibility — especially if you want to grow.
Pay for WordPress Premium
For $99 a year, this upgrade allows you to change a free theme’s design, so you stand out from every other new blogger.
It also removes the random ad WordPress sometimes shows at the bottom of your site.
Buy a Premium Theme
For a professional-looking site with more design options, purchase a Premium theme, which will cost you anywhere between $18 and $175.
How to Save Money on a Self-Hosted Blog
Once you’re comfortable with blog management, you might be ready to take the leap to a self-hosted blog for increased autonomy and flexibility.
Because it’s the most common and easiest to use, I recommend a self-hosted blog through WordPress.
WordPress.org is home to resources and support to help you use WordPress to manage your blog.
To create a self-hosted blog with WordPress, you need to put together (and pay for) the services the all-in-one sites take care of for you.
Main pieces include:
- Hosting: Where will your site’s information be stored?
- Design: What will your site look like? If you don’t want to hire someone to design it from scratch, you’ll have to find, download and install a theme.
- Functionality: Free blogs include some functions you might take for granted, like a comment system, spam protection, backups, sharing, analytics and more. You’ll have to add these manually to your self-hosted blog.
Where to Get the Best Blog Hosting Deal
You’ll find endless blog hosting options, but most blogs use one of a select few:
- HostGator: Introductory rate is $5.95/month, paid for a three-year term ($214.20).
- Bluehost: Introductory rate is $3.49/month, paid for a three-year term ($125.64).
- GoDaddy: Introductory rate is $3.99/month, paid for a three-year term ($144.64).
You’ll use the host to manage your website’s back end, including your domain.
Be ready to make a commitment to your blog, and purchase the standard three-year term at the introductory rate.
Once you start paying annually, the rate will about double — so you’ll save a ton of money paying upfront.
Each of these platforms offers easy WordPress installation with a click.
You won’t have to learn code to build the site and start blogging.
How to Save Money on Blog Design
Unless you have a sweet hookup or an established brand and business, don’t hire someone to design your website from scratch.
It’s a time-consuming and expensive process with little benefit for most bloggers.
Instead, use a theme as a template for your site’s design.
A WordPress install will come with a few free themes you can tweak as you please, but everyone else will probably use these.
To set yourself apart, choose from thousands of WordPress themes. You’ll find them at any price point you want — from FREE to hundreds of dollars.
Bloggers I love overwhelmingly use these themes, which you can buy for under $100 each:
- Genesis: This premiere theme from Studiopress is the base of operations for a ton of additional designs called “child themes.”
- Thesis: The popular theme from DIYThemes uses a unique visual template editor that lets you control your site’s design and functionality without touching any code.
- X Theme: This theme comes with four entirely different, yet totally customizable “Stacks.” Each one is easy to manipulate for a completely unique design.
I also found these themes from Paul Jarvis. They’re all simple to use and focused on content.
And they come at a good price:
- Ponder: FREE! A theme that showcases your words — and only those — on the front page.
- Contents: $39 as of this writing, but looks like it’ll increase to $49 soon. A visually appealing blog for writers.
- Nada: $39 as of this writing, but looks like it’ll increase to $49 soon. A theme with no features — easy to use and fast to load.
- Photos: $39 as of this writing, but looks like it’ll increase to $49 soon. Designed for photographers.
Free Ways to Customize Your Self-Hosted Blog
Because WordPress is an open-source program, developers create plugins to add almost any function you need to your blog.
Most plugins are free, and you can install them with one click through WordPress — an affordable alternative to hiring a developer.
These are my favorite free WordPress plugins:
- WP Editorial Calendar: Get a calendar view of your publishing schedule.
- SEO by Yoast: Easily optimize each post with keywords, a title and a description to increase search traffic.
- Bottom of Every Post and Top of Every Post: Use one of these to add text to each post. Encourage readers to subscribe, share or check out a certain page on your blog.
Because plugins add code to your site, they can affect the functionality of your theme and the loading time of your site. Choose tested plugins that will give you the most benefit — and use them sparingly.
Regardless of where you host your site, here are some more ways to look professional and keep expenses down:
Where to Find Free Design Tools
Customize your blog to showcase your personality or personal brand.
Use a custom header, buttons and logos.
If you want to create your own, use a free photo-editing site. These are my favorites:
- Canva: Canva is a graphic design tool made especially for social media and blogging. Create and download your images for free, or add premium elements for $1 per download.
- PicMonkey: Touch up photos or create a design from scratch with this free tool. For more options, upgrade to PicMonkey Royale for $4.99 a month.
If you want to outsource design, but still save money, try 99Designs or Crowdspring to find quality, affordable designers.
On each of these platforms, designers will offer ideas, and you choose your favorite. Cost will vary, but this could be a smart way to save money by testing a number of lesser-known designers versus hiring someone outright.
Where to Find Free, High-Quality Images
In addition to your header, wow readers with images all over your blog.
Be sure to include them in sidebars and blog posts. And don’t forget your headshot!
You don’t have to be a photographer or dish out a lot of money to do it. Here are some places to find free high-quality photos:
- Creative Commons: Through this search engine, you can find photos licensed for free use around the web. Note the specific license of photos you choose, and attribute accordingly.
- Pexels: This free stock photo site has a limited selection, but you can download high-quality images for free without attribution.
- Unsplash: All photos on this site are licensed under Creative Commons Zero — you can use them however you want, for free, without attribution or permission.
- Death to Stock: Subscribe for free for a pack of lifestyle imagery in your inbox each month.
- MorgueFile: Browse the archives for unique, high-quality free photos. You can also use this site as a search engine to find paid photos on a variety of sites.
Free Tools to Help You Create Better Content
One simple way to look professional without spending extra money is to write great blog posts. These tools can help you do that:
- Soovle: Use this keyword tool to find the most-searched words and phrases. Include those in your headlines and content to help more readers find your blog.
- HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator: This tool helps you find headlines and blog post ideas on what you want to write about.
- CoSchedule Headline Analyzer: Enter your headline idea into this tool to find out whether it’s strong enough to catch readers’ attention.
- Grammarly: Install this browser extension to check your writing for small mistakes you and your spellcheck might miss.
- Hemingway: This free editor helps you clear your writing of complicated, meandering sentences. Readers will appreciate your more concise posts!
Free and Easy Ways to Promote Your Blog
Whew! You have a blog.
Now you need readers. Building a website is challenging, but promotion is a never-ending feat.
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to cost any money — just time. Use these free tools for blog promotion:
- Mailchimp: Use this service to set up an email list to communicate with your readers outside of your blog. It’s free up to 2,000 subscribers.
- Hootsuite: Save time by writing and scheduling social media posts all at once. Hootsuite lets you schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and more. You can also read these platforms feeds all in one place.
- Buffer: Also for social media management, but limited compared to Hootsuite. I love Buffer for its cleaner interface and integration with other apps. It’s great for sharing interesting posts and resources.
- Google Docs, et. al.: Networking and guest blogging is your strongest promotional tool as a new blogger. Use Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Drive to keep track of your efforts and collaborate with people in your network.
Your Turn: What tools do you use to save money on your blog?
Disclosure: A toast to savings! Thanks for allowing us to place affiliate links in this post.
Dana Sitar (@danasitar) is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder. She’s written for Huffington Post, Entrepreneur.com, Writer’s Digest and more.
The post Blog on a Budget Without Looking Cheap: Our Favorite Blogging Tools appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.
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