MY STACK · 4 MIN READ

Stack posts are usually a list of twenty tools, most of which the writer signed up for once. Mine is one thing I pay for and a handful of accounts that are free. I’m publishing it anyway, because the short version is more useful than the long one: almost none of the spending people worry about at the start turns out to matter.

Everything below is what is actually running today, on a site earning $145 a year. When that number changes, this page changes with it.

What I pay for

That’s roughly sixty dollars a year, all in, to run a blog that earns money — broken down month by month in what a blog costs in year one. Every premium SEO suite, AI writer and course I’ve looked at would have cost more per month than the site has earned in total.

The platform, and the two I left behind

WordPress, self-hosted. I started on Bluehost and moved to Hostinger for price rather than any technical complaint, and I’ve also run Ghost. What that move cost and what it fixed is in my Hostinger review.

Ghost is the nicer writing experience by a wide margin and the harder one to monetize — fewer plugins, fewer ad options, and you end up building things that WordPress gives you for free. If your plan is a paid newsletter, Ghost is right. If your plan is affiliate income from search traffic, WordPress is right, and that’s why I’m on it.

The honest summary: all three were fine for a beginner. The differences only started to matter once earning became the goal.

The affiliate networks I’m actually in

Six, which is too many. Only one has ever paid me, and I am leaving them unnamed — some network agreements restrict what you can say about their terms, and there is nothing in the names that helps you anyway.

If you’re starting, join one and use it properly. Applications are free, which makes it easy to mistake approval for progress. I applied to twelve programs across these networks and four have ever sent a commission.

Approval isn’t distribution. A program you are accepted into and never write about earns nothing.

The free tools doing real work

Google Search Console. The only analytics I check weekly. It tells you which questions you’re actually being found for, which is usually not the ones you targeted.

Pinterest. Free traffic that doesn’t depend on ranking, and unusually effective in this niche. Worth the time if your posts have anything visual in them.

The network dashboards themselves. Per-partner conversion data is free and almost nobody looks at it. Twenty minutes in mine found one partner converting at half the rate of another for identical traffic.

Email, and the list I should have started sooner

Email runs through Hostinger as well, on a business email plan billed separately from the hosting — $4.46 when I added it. Cheap, and worth paying for on its own terms rather than because it came free, because it didn’t at this size.

What I got wrong wasn’t the tool, it was the timing. Everything here depends on search rankings I don’t control, and a list is the only audience you actually own. Every month without a signup box is a month of readers arriving and leaving with no way back.

If you’re starting now, put the form up on day one, even when nobody is reading. Twenty subscribers collected slowly beats none collected while you decide which platform to use.

What I’d tell someone starting this month

Buy hosting on a 12-month plan, and take the domain that comes with the first year if your plan offers one. Install WordPress. Join one network. Put a signup box on the site from post one. Spend nothing else until the blog has readers to justify it — and notice that the entire list costs about sixty dollars a year.

This page gets updated whenever the stack changes. Quarterly income reports too.

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