mamamusings

my son's new venture: isowantone.com

My son Lane came downstairs last week and announced that he’d come up with an idea for a new domain name (his old one, he’d determined had too many hypens and was too difficult to remember). I asked him if he was sure his new idea wasn’t already registered, and he assured me it was available. (For an 11-year-old, he’s pretty tech savvy. Dunno how that happened.) “What’s the domain name,” I asked? “isowantone.com,” he replied. (As in “I so want one!”) I blinked, surprised, and asked him if he was sure it was available. He was sure—and he was right.

So for about $8 I registered the domain name, and set it up on my multi-domain hosting account. And then we had a little talk. I pointed out that if he ran it as a blog, and regularly posted information about products he thought were cool, that he could actually make money from the site. He was dubious—it hadn’t occurred to him that a web site could make money rather than simply consuming it. So I told him about Chris Pirillo’s site, and gave him a rough estimate as to how much money Chris was making through Google Adsense. He was suitably impressed. The clincher was when I added that he could probably make that part of his homeschooling—there’d be a writing component, an economics component, a technology component. What’s not to like?

After we talked about “monetization strategies” (as I’ve learned to call them now), he realized that without readers, he’d be unlikely to make much money. So I made a deal with him. Once he had more than three entries, and had committed to at least five entries a week, I’d post an announcement here to get him started. With any luck, some of my faithful readers will take a look, and (if they like what they see) give him a quick shout-out via a link.

Why should you bother? Well, as a parent of two “tweens,” I can tell you that it can be a challenge to know what’s hot (or is it cool?) in their world at any given point in time. I’ll see something in a store that I think is great, and they’ll roll their eyes in exasperation at my cluelessness. I want to play Katamari; they want to play Jak X. And with the holidays almost upon us, I think there’s some real value in having a kids’-eye view of what’s new and notable. Got kids you need to shop for? This is a great way to get ideas.

This isn’t Lane’s first foray into blogdom—he kept a (now-defunct, due to spam overload) blog about his trip to Japan nearly two years ago. And he’s been maintaining his own domain for over a year, teaching himself Javascript so that he could start to build his own virtual world. But this is his first attempt at an online business, and I’d rather have him doing this than delivering papers on cold, wet mornings.

So go. Read. Enjoy. Comment. Click ads. Buy gifts for your favorite tween. Subscribe. And link to him, wouldja? Give a kid a break…

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