Good Blogging Tips for When Money is Tight

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Last Updated on December 28, 2017 by Ellen

A lot of the good blogging tips I see involve investing money into your blog. While that’s always a great idea, it can be difficult to do when money is tight. The first three or four months of each year tend to be slow for blogging work. Budgets have been spent for the holidays and the new budgets are often reserved for later in the new year. This post contains affiliate links, and I will receive compensation if you make a purchase after clicking on my links.

Good Blogging Tips

There are a lot of things that you can do to improve your blog even when you cannot afford to spend any money on classes or a new blog design. These things may seem small but they can make a big difference in the appearance of your blog, how fast it loads, and how long your readers stick around. These good blogging tips will get you started with no added expense.

Remove Unnecessary Things

Do you still have that mommy blog voting widget that was popular four years ago? Do you have banner ads for affiliate programs that you never earn money from? Do you have plugins that you installed months ago but never actually activated? Now is the time to remove unnecessary things from your blog.

Update Old Posts

If you’ve been blogging for a few years like I have, you have probably looked at your older blog posts and thought how awful they were. Maybe not. Maybe I’m the only one that does that. Either way, go back through your old blog posts and revamp them. Improve the photos. Add SEO if you didn’t have it. Add links to related posts on your site. Place a few affiliate links where it makes sense. Then, reshare the blog posts on your social media channels.

Look for Free Classes

I love learning new things but a lot of blogging classes are expensive. When money is tight, that’s an area that I cut back in. That doesn’t mean that you have to stop learning. There are a lot of free blogging classes out there as well as free blogging ebooks. Find one that gets good reviews and work on it while you have time.

Test Your Blog Speed

If your blog takes forever to load, chances are that you are losing traffic. Readers don’t have a lot of patience so if they think your site is loading too slowly, they will go somewhere else. You can test your blog’s speed for free at Pingdom. After you run your free test, it will tell you what types of things are slowing your blog down. Then, just do a few Google searches to figure out how to resolve the problems.

Look for Free Alternatives

There are a lot of plugins and websites that work great for bloggers that have money to spend. However, when money gets tight, these are the things you may want to find free alternatives for. Do you have a subscription to a paid photo service like Dreamstime? Have you considered finding free stock photos instead? Of, if you love Dreamstime, switch from a subscription to a pay per image plan. If you do sign up for Dreamstime (I love it), please use my referral code: res4876034.

Promote Again on Social Media

I use CoSchedule to schedule posts on social media over the next months after they are published. The reason I like this plugin is that I can do all of my scheduling at one time when I create the post. And, I can see what posts are bringing me the most traffic. There’s also a ton of analytics so I can evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. Yes, it’s a paid plugin, but it’s one I find the most useful. If you don’t use it, you can use free versions of things like Buffer to do the same thing. Go back through your posts and repromote the ones that are seasonal and bring the most traffic.

Do you have any other good blogging tips for when money is tight?

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