DIY Website Blog Newsletter-ing On A Budget

DIY Website Blog Newsletter-ing On A Budget is a great resource to getting found online, owning your own content, and significantly saving money from services like Substack or Wix or Squarespace.

More and more people, from small business owners to large, book bloggers to influencers, artists and writers to attorneys, are starting to create their own online platform.

Having a significant digital footprint is a great way to expanding your voice and amplifying your message.

In this short article, I will break down the various Do It Yourself – DIY – hacks and tricks and Don’t’s to grow yourself online.

At CMO Sync we use these methods ourselves as well as for our clients, and there is a lot that you can do yourself, especially when you start out and are in the early growing stages.

Newsletters

If your goal is to create an email newsletter, or even if it is not, online newsletters are becoming vital to reaching your audience, whomever that may be.

As traditional news media declines, and many online news media are riddled with advertisements, more and more readers look to the source, meaning the reporter themselves.

Thus, is the popularity of Substack born.

Substack is a blogging newsletter platform that more and more are using to be able to quickly and easily write something up that looks good, that easily signs up people so that when you publish you can automatically send out to them.

And you can monetize it, so certain content you create or the ability to comment is reserved for paid members of your Stack.

Here’s the thing: Substack takes a significant portion of that paid money, their competitors charge outright to use their platforms (not a free option), and you essentially do not own your content and the SEO-prowess of your words and work being found in searches online (ie Google, DuckDuckGo) goes to where it was first published online, so to the Stack and not to your own site or blog etc.

Should you decide to change services, that content will forever be associated with where it first came out in terms of search engines.

WordPress

This is where DIY comes in handy because you can build your own website for free with WordPress, which has a similar intuitive blog to place your writings, the ability to easily add free plugins to tie in an email newsletter service like Brevo (free plans work very well) and even to automate newsletter signups and sending out your material once you publish a post, via email and social media.

In the past, many have been intimidated by WordPress but it is just as easy as Substack, there are tons of free themes for designs to use, and you get to save cost and own your own stuff.

Others have gone to Wix and Squarespace which are drag and drop site builders to easily make websites.

Aside from a monthly expense to use them, they offer limited SEO tools and little to no free add-ons, because every little thing you want to do on there is an extra fee.

Also, their websites just do not show in online searches, because of the lackluster SEO-tools, unless you already have a large online audience and a long-running domain (.com) name that others will find en masse.

As technology in web builders has improved, so too have the themes for WordPress, paid and free, and they often have great drag/drop abilities for creating even better looking sites.

CMO Sync uses a custom system that is a one-time lifetime fee (and so included in all our site offerings) that allows any page to become a drag and drop builder to easily make edits and additions to your WordPress website; I use it personally and prefer it to any other system.

But there are cheap themes with similar abilities and even free ones out there for WordPress.

You can even monetize your own content on WordPress, like Substack does.

You own your material and the SEO-ability to be found online is far greater with WordPress the CMS used by half of all sites on the net that come with a plethora of free tools, like SEO Yoast, that helps highlight what areas of your page and/or blog can use some help to do the SEO-work that will make you stand out online and be found by the search engines.

I cannot understate how crucial this is for you being found, SEO is vital:

WordPress offers by far the best and most intuitive methods for anyone, even those not in IT or unfamiliar with any online platform, to make the most effective SEO foundation for your online identity.

Residuals are how the Substack’s, the Wix’s, make a killing off of your work online.

What are WordPress costs?

Well, you can host for free on WordPress.org and you can use a free domain name too that will be a .wordpress.

For a little cost, like twenty bucks a year you can buy your own domain name (ie cmosync.com).

For site hosting to publish it online, there are myriad options for WordPress plans, including Siteground that start at about $40 per year (or you can do it monthly).

You can install and run updates on the WordPress hosting yourself or use Siteground’s included Managed WordPress ability which will help you by doing that work for you.

But you can search for many other hosting options as well; Ionos is one of the cheapest but least user-friendly, I find, and Godaddy is one of the most expensive and clunkier out there (they are a “Don’t” use for me – thank me later).

You can usually buy your domain name with wherever you host it, which can make managing those pieces easier.

Emailing the Newsletter

Now, I have been a big fan of Mailchimp, but they have moved away from their free plans so to start with Brevo looks to be a new leader in the field.

For their free plan you can email up to 300 people per day, you can easily integrate their API into your WordPress website for automatic signups, they give you great drag/drop templates to make awesome-looking emails, and they have a ton of other tools if you want to experiment with your online marketing.

That is essentially what you need to get started on the DIY online path.

My recommendations: if you have no other money, I would invest the $20 a year into getting a .com domain name (it can be .net or anything, .com is not necessary).

I do feel paying the $40 or so a year to host your site will make it far more functional and give you the most abilities to fly online (including with fast site speed), and my go-to is often Siteground.

Good hosts include email addresses and inboxes for free with the cost of the hosting plan, and you can use their inbox or tie it to Proton Mail or whatever you like.

I find their online support chat is very good, especially for those starting out and want to set up proper emailing abilities for the site, the email itself and the emailer like Brevo (using DMARC and other anti-spam legitimizers so your email skips the spam folders), and an actual person can usually sort you out quickly.

Then you are off and running, getting shown more online to grow expeditiously, and you are controlling it, while minimizing costs.

And, of course, if you need help getting started or setting it all up so you can plug in and play, CMO Sync is here to help you at any point.

Cheers!

~RJ