Note my tips of growing a business:

• » Start something when most people think it’s a bad time to start something.
• » Sell advertising directly.
• » Spend as little money as possible until you know how you are going to make it.
• » Business first, technology second

 
Om Malik wrote a very educated post about the state of the business of social networking. Because of my side project that became this crazy 17 person company, I’ve been watching the space since before social networking was a phrase that had any meaning.

What Om is pointing out is that is it’s actually quite hard to monetize billions of page serves a month. The biggest problem is it’s simply too much inventory for even the biggest ‘call to action’ advertisers to keep up with, but right behind that the problem is that massive topic-agnostic communities are the opposite of the focused, qualified prospective customers brand advertisers are looking for. My personal belief is that for all the talk and expectations around targeted advertising, I’ve seen very few successes to date for the advertisers or the platform. The big problem I see is that unless you have the scale of say Google Adwords with millions of visitors and hundreds of thousands of advertisers, there’s simply not enough inventory to be meaningful to each target group.

Don’t get me wrong Facebook and MySpace will do great assuming they figure out how to reduce expenses, realize their hypergrowth periods are over and get down to brass tacks on how to make money in the real world and stop thinking they can invent new business models the same way they invent new web features and interfaces.

So it was with great pleasure to get to the end of Om’s manifesto and see Dogster.com (and Catster.com let’s not forget) as examples of how he’s seeing the market change successfully to a much more realistic model.

The way I see it, the market has shifted its focus onto niche social networks, such as those dedicated to sports, music, automobiles and pets. You know, sites like Dogster! They have focused, engaged communities, which means they can attract a higher amount of advertising dollars.

Not only do they have a purpose, but they don’t depend on hit-or-miss behavioral targeting-based ad systems that many hope will one day turn social networks into a gold mine. After all, if you sell dog food, then everyone on Dogster is a potential customer. As for the rest of the sector, it’s only a matter of time before more companies go the way of Tickle, Verizon and CondeNast’s Flip.

I’ve misquoted Ferris Bueller before and I’ll do it again. “The internet goes by pretty fast. If you don’t stop and figure out how to make a profitable business, you could miss it.”

Thanks for recognizing Om.

I turned my camera on him for some tough questions, such as is he a dog or cat guy (dog) and what pets he had growing up.

At the 1:05 mark he clearly compares Apple’s offices at the time he was growing up to our office now. Thanks Robert, we’re flattered ;>

Watch Robert’s pre-interview:

The results of extensive web user research by Jakob Nielsen are written up by BBC and it’s a must read for web companies hoping to increase engagement with information seekers. The crux of the findings is that the average web surfer’s mindset is much more of an efficient hunter and much less a discovering explorer. Users are getting much more proficient at simply extracting the info or link they are seeking and ignoring everything else.

While web publishers continually strive to make their destination sites ’stickier’ and meaningful to the casual visitor, they may only be upsetting the visitor.

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly. “People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” he said.

In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site. In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.

“Basically search engines rule the web,” he said.

At Dogster and Catster we have two very distinct types of users. We have the community enthusiasts, people who enjoy socializing in our community on a regular basis. This type of user is not the use case Jakob Nielsen studied as they are here for entertainment and sociality. Our second type of user, the information and resource seeker is definitely in this category. While many of our information seeks are in a discovery and explorations mindset (such as ‘what kind of dog should I get’ or ‘I wish I could look at a bunch of cute cat photos’, many others are exactly the use case Nielsen studied people people trying to complete their web to-do lists ASAP.

Yet ‘the busy information seeker’ is an important category to us and has accounted for a big percentage of our growth in uniques. (In the last 9 months the number of visitors coming to our site from search engines has increases 60%) Since then we’ve been very focused on reducing the bounce rate of these new visitors. But we’ve also realized that if they don’t want to stay one second longer we shouldn’t get in their way. We can only help them to remember our name so after a search engine takes them to our site, they may come to us first when they have an ensuing pet inquiry. Though everyone obsesses over stats month over month we take a much more year over year view. So please, come to our site, get your info and leave. You’re welcome back anytime, 24/7/365 ;>

A snippet from the program:

There are a lot of interesting asynchronous activities happening on social networks. Some of them are traditional games, others are games in disguise. Join us and hear from some of the leading voices in this space share their views on how to build great gameplay characteristics into social networking applications and what opportunities exist for gameplay to take advantage of the social graph.

The speaker list is a who’s who of the industry and the panels should be superb. I’ll be the starstruck one on my panel as I’ll be aside the leaders of Gaia Online, Habbo Hotel, and IMVU. I’ll be rounding out the conversation and sharing how the in-site games created, run and promoted by our members for other members are critical pieces to our passionate usage and engagement. Furthermore I’ll show how with very little effort it can happen in almost any sized community if nurtured properly.

The talented Joy Ward will no longer be writing the For the Love of Dog Blog after this month. Staying on top of dog news is quite time-consuming as you’d imagine, and Joy needs more time to focus her energies on her forthcoming novel. We look forward to reading it and wish her all the best!

If anyone you know is interested in blogging for Dogster, please have that person contact us at jobs [at] dogster [dot] com.

The job description follows:

Dog Blogger

Dogster.com—the most vibrant, passion-centric, pet-centered community on the web—announces an opening for an exceptional blogger to join our team. This is a contract position providing a fantastic opportunity to work as part of a highly creative, thriving information and social networking site.

Summary:

• Take over Dogster’s popular For the Love of Dog Blog. Cover a wide range of topics relevant to dog lovers: daily real-world news and events, food recalls, adoption and rescue, puppy mills, entertainment, celebrities, etc., as well as the latest happenings on Dogster.
• Write an average of two to three posts per weekday, or 10-15 posts per week, for a minimum of 50 posts per month. Posts should be optimized for search engines and include images. They will be published by the blogger using WordPress blog tools.
• Encourage reader comments and participation.
• Be active inside and outside the Dogster community so as to promote the blog, stay plugged in and be widely known.
• Understand Dogster’s content, copy style and company goals and incorporate these into the blog.

Other Key Responsibilities:

• Experiment with new ideas and content to maximize traffic and reader engagement.
• Assess new standards and trends, and formulate plans for enhancing the blogging strategy.
• Use the latest syndication and blogging tools.
• Ensure images are of good quality.
• Ensure all links are up to date.
• Report bugs and problems.
• Respond promptly to blog comments and email.
• Maintain a BlogRoll of pet sites.
• Stay on top of metrics of traffic statistics, reports and blog comments.
• Act as liaison between blog readers and Dogster.
• Find and/or oversee occasional guest bloggers.

Minimum Job Requirements:

Must possess engaging “conversational” writing skills. Must have prior blogging experience and provide writing samples. Must be computer and Internet/search engine savvy.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

Writing

• Ability to create, compose and edit engaging blog posts.
• Strong proofreading and self-editing skills.
• Ability to write in a conversational style that is harmonious with the Dogster tone and voice.

Social Networking

• Ability to seek out and develop relationships with “blogosphere colleagues”—other sites and blogs—for link exchanges and cross-promotion.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills and the ability to work effectively with a wide range of constituencies in a diverse community.
• Professional but friendly posture with blogsphere colleagues and throughout the Internet.
• Ambassador and liaison for Dogster with the Internet community.

Technical

• Solid understanding of all sections related to the anatomy of a blog.
• Ability to utilize reporting tools for analysis of traffic, referral links and reader demographics.
• Knowledge and understanding of current editing and authoring tools, WordPress in particular, and related blog technologies.
• Ability to utilize word processing, blogging and internet software.
• Solid foundation in search engine optimization (SEO) for blog pages.

And of Course…

• An understanding of the deep bond between pets and humans.

To Apply:

Email your resume and cover letter to us and include “Blogger” in the subject of your email. To be considered for the position, please send a writing sample as well: two blog posts, 100-150 words each, written in the Dog Blog style and tone, along with a short explanation of why you’re right for the job. Original samples are preferred over links to previously published posts.

This is an offsite contract position. Compensation is based on level of experience and blog traffic.

Earlier in the month, Charlene Li, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research presented at Dealmaker Forum and spoke on what business models that will last over the long term.

She sited Dogster.com as a strong example of web business that provides real and lasting utility to internet users and by comparing us to models the she doesn’t see as successful is implying we have a strong business model that we can make it a real and lasting success. Thanks Charlene great to know what makes sense to us does to you to. It’s funny we’ve had labels like social networking and Web2.0 thrown on us by folks trying to qualify us, but we’ve never thought they fit well and we never thought they took into account our business and growth models. We see our selves much more as an entertainment or media property and try and model ourselves as such.

NB: If you read the news.com article, please note the author did not get Steven joke before he went on to explain why doing direct ad sales has been so successful to us from almost day one.

[Photo of Charlene Li by Hyku]

Any companies in the Potrero area wanna meet-up for a game, just give a bark.

Click here if you do not see the video below.

SEO Tools recently launched a superb SEO rank-tracking tool in the form of a Firefox extension. It has reduced the laborious task of checking your important SEO keywords rank from a 30-minute chore to a 1-minute quick fix.

Rank Checker allows you to build and save your SEO keyword list and then run reports on their rankings at Google, Yahoo and MSN Live any time you want. You can also export the results easily. I used to check keywords one at a time, pasting individual results into an Excel spreadsheet one cell at a time. Now in about 10 seconds I can add an entire column of results and get to the much more important task of tracking trends. Another nice feature is it displays the matching URL so I can confirm the terms are leading people to the best landing page possible.

It’s brilliant. The best part is, it was made with privacy in mind. All data travels between your local computer, the search engines’ APIs and back to your computer. Your interesting data is not being spied on, aggregated, repackaged, etc. And it’s all free. (BTW: If you haven’t heard, building good product is the new marketing.)

Other SEO-related entries:

• »Recommended Free Online SEO Tools
• »Control Your Google Sitelinks with Google Webmaster Tools
• »Use Crazy Egg to Track Click Info Effortlessly

Automobile advertisers are wasting money on TV advertising and missing out on Internet opportunies.
 

Anyone in advertising will know the ad industry rub: “We know we’re wasting half our money on television advertising, we just don’t know which half.” The reality is that large advertisers and the advertising industry spend so heavily on TV advertising because they’re all convinced it works, and they are not ready to cope with the reality that it is not. There is a very cozy ecosystem of ad industry who keep propping up the belief that they don’t need to know which half is working. Turns out it worked for less than 20% for automobile advertisers, and there’s no reason to think it’s the same for others.

If any automotive advertisers would like to learn how to have a big impact on the web, please contact us at 415.934.0400. Did you know 60% of dog owners consider their pet when buying a new car? We’ll be able to tell you what we did for Suzuki Motors and how to integrate your brand very successfully into large user pools and be part of their conversations and even their lives, in ways TV never will be able to.

 

 
(Source and chart via MarketingCharts.)