Today, I’ve decided to answer a question that I’ve been seeing a lot in various internet marketing forums and that I get via e-mail quite a bit.  The question is usually something to the effect of “How much money does it take to start blogging?”  This is an important question because I think the answer (or what some newbies might think the answer is) can deter them from getting started.  Let’s dive right in.

1. To begin with, you need a quality program to teach what you need to know.  While it is possible to try to learn everything on your own, I wouldn’t recommend it.  Why?  In my experience, not only took me longer to progress (learned more in one week with a quality program than I did after 6 months of trying to do it on my own), but I found that I was missing vital pieces of the overall process.  For product recommendations, I recommend that you check out Google Sniper 3 ($47 for main product, all you really need, make sure to uncheck the box on the sales page if you don’t want the optional “Sniper X”).

2. You will need to purchase a domain name.  You usually pay for domain names on a yearly basis.  The reason for this is because if a site is not performing, you might want to let it go or decide to sell it or something.  The cost for this is around $13 a year.

3. You will need to purchase web hosting.  Web hosting is where your content is stored.  This is paid for on a monthly basis.  This cost less than $10 a month.  This is the price for unlimited domains.  This means that whenever you decide you want to have more than one site (most marketers do), all you will have to pay for is the domain name.

4. After your website begins to get traffic, you should start building a list.  In IM, we build list with an autoresponder.  The most popular autoresponder is Aweber.  Awber offers a $1 trial for the first month.  After that, it’s like $19.00 a month — until you get up to a certain amount of subscribers.

So far, the total comes to $71.00 for the first month.  Keep in mind that all of these costs are standard and DO NOT include up-sells or anything like that.  At the start of the second month, you take away the cost of Google Sniper and add the regular autoresponder cost. This brings the total to $43.00 in the second month and so on.

5. You will need a product to promote.  This can vary and may not cost you anything.  When first starting out, I recommend that newbies go into a niche that they already know something about and in a niche in which they already own products — especially if you’re promoting a physical product.  All you have to do is to make sure that people are searching for it, so you’ll get traffic.

If the product is a digital one (something that can be downloaded), all you have to do is contact the product creator and ask for review access.  This is the marketer’s way of asking something for free.  Make sure to tell them that you are building a site in order to promote their product.  They will happily give you access.  Remeber, all of these costs are standard and can be made up with just a couple of sales.

Until next time…