Blogging can be an expensive hobby to have, from domain renewals to blog props and products to review, it all adds up. I have been blogging for years now and I like to do things as affordable as possible. I thought I would share some of the ways I continue to blog on a budget...

I still buy a lot of the products that I review so that is one of the most expensive things about blogging for me but I do it because I love makeup and really enjoy writing about it. The second most expensive thing about blogging is all to do with photography. We live in a world we are told that everything has to be 'Instagram ready' and believe it or not, my house isn't full of marble surfaces ready for photos so buying backgrounds, props, editing software etc can be expensive if you're not careful. I recently wrote a post all about how I make my backgrounds for under £7 each and where I buy all of my props that I will link at the end. There are a couple of companies that specialise in backgrounds for photos but I can't afford a lot of them and honestly, you don't need too. I buy sticky back plastic and an A1 piece of card for £3 = new background!





Almost all of the bloggers I chat with use Photoshop or Lightroom but I just can't get the hang of it, not to mention it is really expensive. If you have an iMac or MacBook then I highly recommend PhotoScape X (I'm not sure if its available on Windows). I have the free version and it's what I have been editing my photos with for the last couple of years, you can buy the pro version for about £20 but I have never needed the extra tools personally. Another great way to edit photos is with Photoshop Express on your phone, this is usually how I will edit my Instagram photos but I'm sure you could airdrop your blog photos onto your phone and edit them that way too. This is again another free option.





Natural lighting is your best friend for picture-perfect photos. As soon as I discovered it, my photos transformed! I always take my photos in front of my back door on an overcast and bright day and bulk take my photos as much as I can. I don't think you need to have a DLSR camera anymore either with how good cameras on phones have gotten, I have never had a fancy camera for my blog photos until a couple of months ago when I started using my Dad's but I don't think it's made *that* much of a difference because I still don't understand half of the settings!





I schedule all of my blog promotion tweets and I know there are so many paid options that everyone loves but I love Tweetdeck (again, it's free!). I will usually just copy and paste the tweets and use a different photo or add an emoji to each tweet to make sure that they don't fail as you can't publish the exact same tweets twice with Tweetdeck. It honestly doesn't take me too long to do them for the week either.





I use Blogger for my blog and bought my domain a couple of years ago to get rid of the .blogspot.com and I'm so glad that I did! I know everyone says Wordpress is better but I hate it with a passion so I will never leave Blogger (plus, Blogger is free!). Some bloggers pay for hosting and all these other things just to run their blog but it only costs me about £12 a year for mine. I like to update my template every year in January to remotivate myself to blog for the year ahead and Etsy is my best friend. My latest template cost me about £10 and the girl I bought it from even installed it for me for free because I just couldn't work it out this time. My past templates have usually cost me between £4 - £8 too! I always search for 'responsive blogger templates'.





Posts of Interest:







