Start Your Own Hosted-Blog Service
It’s something that has been on my mind for a while and Wordpress MU has made it incredibly easy to set up. It might be a busy niche but with the rapid increase in blogs, there is definitely room for more, especially with great branding ideas.
Initially I wanted to make a service for hosting ‘dream-blogs’ - a place where you could record your dreams. It never panned out but you can see what I was trying to do, and what I maintain is the key to success – find a unique hook in a crowded niche.
As a result of my interest in making a hosted blog service, I have encountered some brilliantly brandable domain names. Today I have two domain names that could tie into one service - call it My Journal.
I don’t yet have a unique hook for it, that will be your job. What I do have is two incredible available domain names.
MyJNL.com could act as the service front page, while JNL.me could act as the hosting page – eg. james.jnl.me or jnl.me/james – A nice short domain that users can promote.
![[Post to Twitter]](/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter.png){kind=icon}
That’s a very great idea, James. I’ve had that idea come into my head once or twice. I think the jnl.me will look nice with that kind of service and also I think it will really go well with the sub-domain james.jnl.me instead of the jnl.me/james because the james.jnl.me looks nicer and is easier to remember :).
The idea of owning a blog-hosting service is great. Whoever snaps up JNL.me is a very lucky person… Unfortunately I have too much on my plate right now to be able to allocate sufficient time to that!
However, in general these sort of projects are really, really good. Often it’s great to tap in to a specific niche, for example an extreme sport, kitesurfing. Give users their own blog and they love it. They tell their friends, and it goes viral. Still, if you have the marketing skills to do a very general one like JNL would be, you’re in the big time!
@Shirley jnl.me is now registered so I think somebody liked the idea!
@Simon Some great thoughts there. It’s definitely a good idea to target a more niche area as with competitors like Google and Wordpress it would be pretty difficult to find market share.
An interesting idea, but how do you plan to monetize it? With a hosted blog service, it sounds like you’re going to provide technical service. And anytime you provide customer support, you’re forcing yourself to be on call, which ultimately leads to hiring staff. And hiring staff is more management work.
What you want to shoot for is somekind of business model where you spend as little time as possible managing customers, where you don’t have to be on call, and not have to hire staff.