Starting Frugally
Post written by Leo Babauta.
When I started Zen Habits, not only did I have zero money to invest in a small business, I was deep in debt. I couldn’t afford to hire a designer, pay for an expensive host, buy software, hire staff, pay for anything really. But I started. I didn’t let my lack of funds slow me down, and in fact I think it’s best to start with free or cheap.
Start small, and grow your budget only as your audience and income grows.
This kind of frugality is actually a good thing: you won’t invest money that won’t be paid back, as start-up businesses often do. They put a lot of money into a business before there’s even an income, and often the income doesn’t grow fast enough to repay the investment or debt.
Staying small also means you’re more nimble, adaptable to change. Low overhead means you’re lean, and it takes less revenue to succeed. You’re less susceptible to economic recession as well. So stay lean, even as you grow — the fewer the expenses, the better. Make every expense be completely justified, make every dime count.
How to Start With Zero
You don’t need any money to be a blogger. Here’s how to get started with no budget:
- Use free blog software and a free host. I started on Blogger.com, because I felt it was easiest to learn, but these days I recommend WordPress.com — it’s professional blogging software that’s free and not hard to learn, and you can expand upon it as you grow, unlike Blogger. Both WordPress.com and Blogger.com give you free hosting as well. There are other similar services and software out there, including Typepad and Tumblr.
- You don’t need to buy a domain. I didn’t, though eventually I did. However, if there’s one small investment you might make, it would be buying a domain. Not necessary, but at $10 for a year, it’s not too expensive.
- Use free services. I use the free Feedburner for serving up my RSS and email feeds, for example, and have since the early days. There are software packages for bloggers you can buy, but none are necessary.
- Use free blog templates. The free blogging software I mentioned above comes with a set of free design templates already installed, and if you use WordPress software, you can later choose from thousands of great, free WordPress themes. You don’t need a professional designer to get started.
- Use free images. For almost two years, I used Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr for all my posts. There are lots of great ones, and they’re free. Eventually I switched to paid photos, but they’re not necessary.
There are other examples of free stuff you can use, but that’s pretty much all you need to get started.
Stay Lean as You Grow
As your blog starts to grow an income, you can start paying for things, but only slowly, and as cheaply as possible.
- Get a cheap host. I used Bluehost after moving from Blogger, and it cost $8 a month. I could justify that because I was making more than that from Google Adsense, so I was still profitable. Dreamhost is another decent cheap host — there are a number of them. These days I pay a lot more for a host, but for well over a year, a cheap host was good enough for Zen Habits. It wasn’t until I had more than a million pageviews a month that I needed a better host.
- Buy a domain. As soon as you can afford it. Again, it’s only $10 a year.
- Use cheap services. I use e-junkie.com, for example, to host, serve up, and sell my ebooks and other digital products.
- Give payments on the back end. For my first ebook, I was able to work out a deal with a designer, giving him a small cut of proceeds once the ebooks started selling, as I couldn’t afford to pay him up front.
- Only hire as needed. For a while, I hired a personal assistant to help me keep up with email and comments, as my blog’s traffic took off. Eventually I stopped that, and instead stopped email and comments. It’s better to simplify than to increase your budget.
I’ve since grown my income so that I can pay for more: a better host, a professional designer for my blog, people to help run courses I teach, etc. But at heart, I’m still a cheapskate, and Zen Habits is kept lean and profitable to this day.