How to save money blogging - 11 tips for beginner bloggers (2024)

If you are about to start a blog and are serious about growing and monetising it, you know you MUST INVEST in tools, apps, and other products to make it a success. But is there is a reason why you shouldn’t look for ways to save money blogging?

You might think that a lot of the tools and apps are not expensive at all, but when you add them all together… Well, you can end up spending quite a lot of money every month.And depending on what niche you’re in, how much time you have to work on it and what your strategies are it might take you a little for your investment to pay off and start making you serious money.

So why not try some of the following tips to save you some money as you grow your blog?

Some essential tools you will need immediately.

If you are on wordpress.org or another free blogging platform, I’d recommend you move to wordpress.com as soon as you can, so you will need yourdomain nameandweb hosting.

Having a premium WordPress themeis not necessary at the start, but if you want to get one now, you can check outStudioPress or Bluchic for some great themes.

Then you need a way to capture leads and start an email list.

And you can start doing that with ConvertKit, for free. Later on, when you have enough subscribers and/or are making an income, you can start paying and you might need a tool like OptinMonster, which is much more sophisticated, for capturing your leads.

Then you need a social media schedulerthat will help you promote your blog and reach more people.

That’s just the essential stuff, the rest you can add bit by bit as you have more content, create your first products, etc.

Doing things manually is also a way to save money blogging.

It is great for things that will give you (nearly) instant results and will help you increase traffic to your blog, like participating in Facebook Groups and promotion threads, or pinning manually to group Boards.

The things I wouldn’t do manually are things that take you so much time to do by hand when a cheap tool will do the job in a fraction of the time.

Apps with FREE plans are usually limited in the number of things you can do but they let you try a product for a while so you get used to it and you learn how to use it.

Better still, try 2 or 3 tools to see which one works best for you. This is great if you want to which social media scheduler works best for you.

And there are also some great blogging resources like this free free graphic design course,or this freeaffiliate marketing course.

You can get more than 50 free resources for bloggers in this blog post.

Another way to get some free bloggin resources is to try out Kindle Unlimited for FREE. There are some great blogging books you can get in Kindle Unlimited and they're all short enough to read them while your free trial lasts. Why not give it a go?

Another way you can save money blogging is by finding alternatives.

• For instance, you want to take a blogging course by a famous blogger but it costs $1000s. If spending that kind of money is putting you off, try finding an alternative like this onebySuzi Whitfordat a fraction of the price.

TIP:To find alternatives to tools go tohttps://alternativeto.net/and do a search.

A great way for beginner bloggers to save money blogging is to write a blog post about the tools they use.

Some tools offer you a generous discount (up to 50%) if you write a review and all you need to do is let them know when it’s done (be sure to follow their terms and conditions).ViralTag, ProwritingAid and CoScheduleare a couple of tools that do that.

If a tool you love doesn’t offer this, try asking them directly if they could or have plans to set this up in the future.

If there’s a tool you love, join their referral system and start sharing your link on social media, in your emails and in blog posts, so every time somebody that used your link subscribes to it, you get some credit or a free month.

TailwindandSmarterqueue do this.

I know this means that you are going to pay everything in one go and these dealswill lock you in with one provider for a period of 1, 2 or 3 years, but the savings are significant.

The best deals I have seen for this are: web hosting for 3 years withSiteground, gettingTailwind for a year and you save 4 months.

You can also buy bundles where you get lots of products by different bloggers at a much-reduced price, for instance, withUltimate Bundles.

During the last few years, the number of tools available for bloggers and online entrepreneurs keeps growing and growing. Years ago, you used to have 1 or 2 options, but now there are new companies that want to enter the market and are trying to get more customers. Watch out for free betas or ridiculously priced plans.

You might get a fantastic deal with some of these tools. The reason for this is that young startups need to show they have a growing number of users in order to get funding for further development. So you save lots of money and they increase the number of users, win-win.

You can find deals like that atAppsumo, where you pay $39 or $49 for a lifetime deal. Even in the worst case scenario that one of the companies stops offering the deal, you have already saved lots of money.

If you thought haggling is something you should only do for your holiday shopping, think again. This works for apps that charge for a monthly or yearly subscription.

If the cheapest plan is not enough for you but the next one is too expensive, ask if they might build you a personalised plan. The newer companies are more likely to do this for you but it doesn’t hurt to try with more established companies.

I tried this with a landing pages provider a couple of years ago, cos I wasn’t sure if it would make a difference (call me silly) and I wanted an “extended trial” but I also wanted to save money. They gave me a 3-month deal rather than a 1-year deal that was much cheaper than paying monthly.

The last tip for beginner bloggers that want to save money is to become an affiliate because it doesn’t just save you money but can potentially make you lots of money too.

Writing how-to guides about your favourite products can be a source of income for you quite early on, so choose 1-3 of your favourite products to start with and apply to become anaffiliate.