Starting a Company Blog: Real Costs and 5 First-Month Tasks

Starting a company blog costs less than most teams expect. A domain runs KRW 26,400 a year and managed hosting starts at KRW 10,800 a month, and the machinery is done. The real cost comes after that — someone has to publish every month, get the posts indexed, and keep the site from breaking. What you set up in the first month decides how much of that time you spend.

What this article covers
① The actual line-item cost of starting a company blog, and ② the five things to do in the first month, in order: choosing the address, registering with search engines, picking the first four posts, opening a subscription channel, and naming who maintains the site. Every price quoted was checked on the vendor’s official pricing page in September 2026.

What starting a company blog actually costs

A working blog needs four things: an address (domain), somewhere to sit (hosting), software to write in, and a way to bring readers back (a newsletter). Here is what each one costs at list price.

• Domain — Gabia lists .com at KRW 26,400 per year, and .co.kr and .kr at KRW 23,100 (VAT included). This one repeats annually.
• Software — WordPress itself is a free download from the official site. Nothing is spent here.
• SSL certificate — Let’s Encrypt issues them free, and most hosts attach one automatically. If a provider still bills separately for a certificate in 2026, ask why.
• Hosting — Cafe24’s managed WordPress First Class plan is KRW 10,800 a month (one-year term, VAT included).
• Newsletter — Stibee Standard starts at KRW 8,900 a month (VAT included) and rises with subscriber count.

That adds up to KRW 262,800 for the first year (26,400 domain + 129,600 hosting + 106,800 newsletter) — a little over twenty thousand won a month. Cost is not what stops a company blog from starting.

One line item is missing: maintenance. WordPress updates core, themes, and plugins separately, and postponing them leaves known vulnerabilities open. Doing it in-house costs nothing in cash; outsourcing it runs about KRW 100,000 a month at Korean agencies that publish their rates. What is and is not included at that price varies more than the price itself does.

When you should not outsource. If someone in-house has handled WordPress before and can spend an hour or two a month on updates and backup checks, the KRW 262,800 setup is the cheapest option available. The rest of this article is for companies without that person.

First month, task ① — settle the address first

Decide whether the blog lives under the company domain (example.com/blog) or on a separate one. Absent a specific reason, under the company domain is better: the trust search engines build up accumulates on one property instead of being split across two.

Addresses are hard to change later. Move the blog after posts have piled up and rankings wobble, and you owe one redirect per post. Thirty extra minutes in the first month saves days a year from now.

First month, task ② — register the site with search engines

Publishing does not put a page in search results. Google’s own documentation states that crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and that requesting a crawl does not guarantee inclusion — immediately or at all. The same page notes that for a site you have just launched, submitting a sitemap works better than submitting URLs one at a time.

So in the first month, verify ownership in Search Console and — for the Korean market — in Naver Search Advisor, then submit the sitemap and RSS feed. Indexing is waited for, not accelerated. Register late and your first visitors are pushed back by exactly that much.

First month, task ③ — take the first four posts from customer questions

Company introductions, product launches, anniversary events — the most common first posts, and nobody searches for any of them. Instead, write down what customers actually asked on the phone or by email last month. Four questions that keep coming up before a quote is requested will surface quickly. Those are your first four posts.

Roughly 1,200 words each, one a week, is four posts in the first month. Sustaining a manageable rhythm for six months beats trying to publish daily and stopping after three weeks. Search engines revisit sites that update steadily more often than sites that dump content once.

Put the words customers type into search into the title. Not “our differentiated solution” but “when is a tax invoice due” — the language used inside a company and the language typed into a search box are usually not the same.

First month, task ④ — build one way to bring readers back

Someone who arrives from search gets their answer and leaves. Bringing them back requires a way to reach them, and the cheapest one is a newsletter. Add a single subscribe field under your posts in the first month and you have a list six months later. Add it later and those six months are simply gone.

One caution: sending marketing email in Korea requires a record of consent and a working unsubscribe path. Both are easy to omit when a subscribe field is hand-built. Turning on email confirmation (double opt-in) records consent automatically.

First month, task ⑤ — put maintenance ownership in writing

Write one line naming who updates the site, when, and how far their responsibility extends. Without it, six months later nobody is doing it. A site whose maintenance has stopped announces itself — a “Not secure” warning in the address bar, or a login screen that no longer opens.

Four things need an owner.

• Updates — who applies core, theme, and plugin updates each month. Checking that nothing broke afterwards is part of the same job.
• Backups — how often, and where they are kept. Backups stored only on the same server die with that server.
• Recovery — how many hours until the site is restored after an incident. A promise without a number is not a promise.
• Accounts — who holds the admin login and the domain registrar account. When a staff member leaves, these two go missing first.

If nobody in-house can take those four, they can be handled together. WOR-PRO Lab’s Managed plan is KRW 99,000 a month (VAT excluded) and covers hosting, updates, and backups alongside search and AI-answer visibility setup and newsletter delivery management, as one subscription.

In numbers: assembling the pieces and outsourcing maintenance costs KRW 1,462,800 in the first year (262,800 + 1.2M in agency fees); bundling it costs KRW 1,333,200 (1,306,800 managed + 26,400 domain). If you can handle maintenance yourself, KRW 262,800 remains the cheapest — and in that case we are not going to tell you to hire us.

Starting a company blog: the first-month checklist

• The blog address sits under the company domain
• Search Console and Naver Search Advisor ownership verified, sitemap and RSS submitted
• Four post titles drawn from questions customers actually asked
• A subscribe field is live and email confirmation is on
• Updates, backups, recovery, and accounts each have a named owner

Five lines, and that is the whole list. First months fail for lack of these, not for lack of budget — usually because two or three of them were left for later. Tasks ② and ④ in particular push your results back by exactly as long as you postpone them.

Sources

• Gabia domain registration — .com KRW 26,400/year, .co.kr and .kr KRW 23,100 (VAT included)
• Cafe24 New Managed WordPress — First Class KRW 10,800/month (one-year term, VAT included)
• Stibee plan types — Standard from KRW 8,900/month (VAT included)
• Fork9 website maintenance pricing — STANDARD KRW 100,000/month
• Google Search Central, Ask Google to recrawl your URLs — crawling takes days to weeks
• WordPress.org download · Let’s Encrypt — software and SSL at no cost
• Naver Search Advisor guide — ownership verification, sitemap, RSS

Focus keyword: starting a company blog
SEO keywords: starting a company blog, company blog cost, business blog setup, WordPress blog, domain price Korea, newsletter subscription, blog search visibility

자주 묻는 질문

What is the minimum cost of starting a company blog?

About KRW 262,800 for the first year if you count only the machinery: a domain at KRW 26,400 (Gabia .com, one year, VAT included), hosting at KRW 10,800 a month (Cafe24 managed, one-year term), and a newsletter at KRW 8,900 a month (Stibee Standard). WordPress itself and the SSL certificate are free. That figure assumes you handle updates and backup checks in-house; outsourcing maintenance adds roughly KRW 100,000 a month at published Korean agency rates.

How long before a new blog post shows up in search?

Not immediately. Google states that crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks, and that requesting a crawl does not guarantee the page appears in results — immediately or at all. That is why ownership verification in Search Console and Naver Search Advisor, plus sitemap and RSS submission, belongs in the first month. Registering late pushes your first visitors back by the same amount.

Should the blog live under the company domain or on its own?

Under the company domain (example.com/blog) unless there is a specific reason not to, because the authority search engines build accumulates on one property instead of splitting across two. Addresses are also hard to change later: moving after posts have accumulated unsettles rankings and creates one redirect per post.