How Much?

[Lacie8]

depends on what kind of money you NEED to make to make it worth your time?

you can certainly get started for nothing or next to nothing but if you NEED (not want) to make a significant amount of money i.e. more than 75-100 per day than you will certainly need to invest more.

so first be specific and determine how much you need to make and then you can start planning out the rest

[Gayla]

The startup investment is the easy part. It's the time you will need to invest that's the most difficult really.

For startup, I would suggest banking on getting a new blog up and running for under $200. If done right - and if you and do most of the template work yourself, under $100.

Speaking from experience and having several failed affiliate blogs in my portfolio along with a few that were successful to very successful - I can say do your homework first. Make sure you know what you are getting into. Have a business plan for your blog - get just the right domain name and know who your target audience will be.

[websitemarketing]

There are a ton of free tools out there I use a lot of them and several paid tools. The problem with a lot of the free tools is that each tend to do 1 or 2 things so you have to use several to get the same result as some of the paid tools which is as MIke said more of a time issue, but when your just starting out its better to do a lot of the stuff yourself anyhow so you know it then when your business gets going you can automate it more and more as you become familiar with the paid tools and understand their functions.