This is the fifth in a series of monthly reports detailing the revenue and expenses from building my blogging business.
In the first three months of 2017 (January, February, and March) I discussed productivity strategies, getting started with lead magnets, expert round-up posts, and the importance of building a community around you and your blog. In these months I had $68.20 of expenses and no revenue.
In this report we will cover an unexpected expense I had going into my second year of blogging. We will also discuss an alternative support community strategy – building your own!
Disclosure: some of the links in the income reports are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase through them, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you, but is a way to help support gradblogger.com. We encourage you not to purchase these products unless you feel they will help you achieve your goals and suggest that you check the resources page for our current list of recommended tools and services.
April 2017 Summary
In addition to my Boomerang, Mailchimp, and Self Employed PhD group charges this month, I had an additional charge of $15.99 USD from Bluehost on April 23 for registration of my blog domain name.
This charge was a bit of a surprise, as I did not realize that an annual registration would be required in addition to the annual hosting fee which was charged later in June.
After looking into it, most hosting companies treat domain registration (actually registering your .com, .ca, .edu, ext.) separately from hosting your website (actually storing the files so that they can be accessed online).
Very often, the first year of the domain registration fees are waived when you sign onto a new hosting program. For example, see the receipt in my June 21 to December, 2016 income report. Furthermore, introductory rates are generally offered for hosting at the start, which becomes more expensive in subsequent years once your website is more established.
It is then important to keep in mind the initial cost to setup your blog will not be the same as the annual cost in subsequent years. From my first income report, registering and setting up hosting was $35.40 for the first year. Subsequent years, including 2017, have a higher annual cost of $123.87.
Keeping in mind the increase in price in subsequent years, Bluehost is still my recommended website hosting provider at the time of writing this post (December, 2018). Visit the GradBlogger resources page to see our current recommendations if reading this post in the future.
An Alternative Support Community Strategy – Build Your Own!
In last month’s income report, I discussed the importance of finding like-minded people to support you on your blogging journey. For me, this was the Self Employed PhDÂ community, which I am still a member of today through the BeyondProf platform.
Although I love this community, most of the members were freelancers, coaches, editors, speakers and other “service-based” business owners (this is starting to change now at the time of writing). Even though they were a tremendous help in pushing my business forward, I still felt like I was doing something different by creating a business through blogging, podcasting, and creating video about my research expertise.
How, then, did I get support for these other parts of my business? I built my own community around this vision!
In April of 2017, I launched The Academic Blogging Network group on Facebook with the mission of “helping graduate students and post-grads create and grow niche websites or blogs based on their academic research or expertise”.
Although we have started transitioning this community to be part of GradBlogger, the current goals are very similar to the ones I created for the original group:
- How to start an academic website/blog
- How to create content around your research
- How to grow and create a community
- How to monetize/create an online business
Building your own community is a very powerful way to put yourself at the forefront of the change your are trying to put into the world (in my case academic entrepreneurship). It also pulls in people with the same interests and gives you that support network you need to ask questions, brainstorm ideas, and get help while growing your blogging business!
