Don't fall into the "Cheap" trap!

When I first started my blog, I tried to do everything on the cheap. I’ve regretted it every single time! Don’t fall into the same traps!

Image: Bill Longshaw / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Hosting

I hosted on a shared server, with a small European provider, at around $5 a month. The site suffered frequent downtime, was painfully slow and the support was poor.

I eventually upgraded to a virtual private server with Inmotion Hosting and I pay $54 a month now. It’s fast, easy to use, is never down and the support is fantastic.

Email Subscriber List

I started off with a small provider, because they offered a 60 day free trial. The system worked, but I had some issues with emails getting through and there was no autoresponder available to market to my readers.

I changed to Aweber, and now I pay $49 a month (It’s $19 for up to 500 subscribers). It’s amazing, offering total deliverability and everything you need to successfully market to people as well as stay connected with them.

Product Sales

I started by using the smallest provider because they were just $5 a month. But they couldn’t cope with subscriptions, so I moved to a big provider where I had to pay $50 per product to register it. But they didn’t give me decent control over my affiliates.

So I moved to 1 Shopping Cart, where I pay $99 a month, but where I can offer a fantastic service to affiliates, payment and delivery of products is instant, and I’m in complete control.

Design

At first I designed all my own stuff. I spent hours on producing poor graphics in Photoshop, which just made everything look cheap.

Now I use designers, professionals who can turn around a brilliant high quality design in no time at all – freeing me up to do what I do well. These guys can do a far better job than me in a tenth of the time, paying them is worth every penny, when I weigh it against the value of my time.

These are just four examples, and I could go on and on with others. I also understand the financial pressure when you first start blogging, but consider this:

When I try to quantify the lost readers, lost subscribers, lost sales and so many hours of my own time wasted, I would go back in time and do all of the above from day one.

If you’re just starting out, and you’re serious about creating a business from your blog, please take my advice – if it looks cheap, it may end up costing you.

Disclosure: There are some affiliate links not-so cunningly disguised in the text above – if you click them and buy a product I will earn a small commission