GETTING STARTED · 3 MIN READ

Every starting guide puts “set up a professional email address” in the first five steps, usually with a line about looking credible. I skipped it. Seven months and ten conversions later, I still do not have one on this domain.

That is not a recommendation. It is a data point, and it contradicts the checklists: nothing about earning money from a blog required a matching email address. I am setting one up now, and the honest reason has nothing to do with credibility.

What it does not do

It does not get you traffic and it does not affect rankings. Readers arriving from search never see your address at all.

It does do something for the people who write to you. Some will feel safer emailing jean@oneblogger.com than a Gmail address, and that is worth having — it just cannot do anything for you until you have readers who want to make contact. Which, in the first few months, you will not.

So if you are pre-launch and choosing between an hour on email setup or an hour on your second post, write the post. The address will still be available next month.

When it starts to matter

Three moments, and none of them are about looking professional.

You want to own the address. A free Gmail account belongs to Google. An address on your domain belongs to you for as long as you keep the domain, which means you can move it between providers without telling anyone your contact details changed.

You start an email list. Sending from a domain you control is the part that affects whether your emails arrive at all, which matters far more than what the address looks like.

You have more than one site. This is the one that finally moved me, and it is the only place where the choice of provider actually matters.

One site or several

If you run one blog and do not want to think about it again, the mailbox included with your hosting is enough. Hostinger’s free tier gives you one gigabyte and one alias on your domain at no cost, and it does the job that an address on your domain needs to do.

If you run several, the calculation changes — but not in the direction I expected. I have a dozen domains on one hosting account, and a free mailbox on each of them still costs nothing. Google Workspace starts around $7 a month. On price, the host wins and it is not close. Both sets of prices, renewal figures included, are itemised in the hosting renewal trap.

What the paid account buys is one inbox instead of twelve. Aliases across every domain, real Gmail, and no logging into a different webmail depending on which site someone wrote to. That is a time argument, not a money one, and anyone selling it to you as a saving is not counting properly.

I am about to pay for it on that basis, and I have not done it yet. I will write up what it actually cost and what broke once I have, not before.

Do it when you have a reason. Looking professional is a weak one on day one and a decent one once people are actually writing to you.

What to do this week

If you have not launched, nothing. If you have readers and no way for them to reach you, add whatever address you already own to a contact page and move on. If you are about to start a list, or you have collected more than one domain, that is the point to sit down and choose properly.

Everything this site costs to run, including what I pay and what came free, is itemised in my stack.

I’ll write up the email setup once it’s done, costs included. One email, no sequences.

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