Today the Financial Times ran the most extensive article to-date on how Dogster, Inc. has made a real business out of running happy community websites. Though it’s professionally gratifying to have our business stategy highlighted by the Financial Times, I also wanted to share this article as it’s exactly the same advice I offer to anyone seeking direction on making a business out of a passion-centric website.

Text ads from Google were not a permanent solution, however. As Dogster’s audience grew, Mr Rheingold found that the returns from Google advertising were not as high as he liked. He experimented with advertising resellers, which sell banner ads across large numbers of websites, but again found that returns were lacking.

“We’ve found that the best way to get ads that are relevant to our members is to have our own inventory,” he says.

By selling its own inventory of banner ads to companies that specifically wanted to target dog and cat lovers, Dogster is able to charge $5 or more for every thousand impressions on this site.

Although this required an in-house advertising team, it was a far more lucrative proposition than the 12 cent CPMs he was getting with banner ads or the few cents a click he was getting from Google.

The whole article can be read here. We actually make more via AdSense, but $6k a month does not a business make.

There’s more to our financial success than the article covered, such as seeking advertisers that want strategic sponsorship-like relations and going the distance to deploy advertising campaigns that will be well received by our membership, but it’s a good start and I wanted to share.

Dogster, Inc. is casting a wide net to find the perfect Director of Marketing. The question we keep returning too, however, is what the definition of “perfect” is. Marketing and people’s awareness of being marketed to has changed so much in the last 10 years that though we still expect our Director of Marketing to posess many traditional MBA-style skills, we think it would be a big mistake if they don’t understand the modern concept of marketing as a conversation and the fact it’s about people, not eyeballs, silos or buckets.

You can see our job desription on our site.

What do you think we as a company with great word of mouth and lots of friendly press should consider to be ther perfect traits of our future marketer? We have worked hard to generate enough money to fill this role and pay for the campaigns. We really want to get this right the first time. We have also linked to this entry from our job description page and encourage candidates to be involved.

In this modern era of communication what traits would you think are critical, what are nice-to-haves and what should be forgotten altogether?

It seems like every month we have a great new engineer to bark about and we could definitely get used to that. We’ve been able to roll out new features at an unprecedented rate and the membership is loving it. Paul will only be adding to that.

Paul comes to us with an Fine Arts degree in New Media from the Academy of Art University and a multi-year passion for coding. For the last two years Paul ran the San Francisco-based Faucet Studio where he designed, coded and deployed custom web applications for a nice list of clients. Paul is an engineer that is also an entrepreneur and artist and I think that’s why he liked us as much as we liked him.

Local geeks may also know Paul from Super Happy Dev House, an excellent geek monthly and the 40Deals.com site he and his team put together in a recent competition. Paul’s already hard at work finalizing our Dogster and Catster javascript badge and preparing a Flash version so look forward to integrating Dogster and Catster into other sites you use everyday.

12 months ago we simply gave up trying to find a partner that could print member’s pet photos on keepsake items. We even went as far as scheming a mini-business plan that included buying keepsake items, a printing machine taking orders , and printing the items ourselves, but it just didn’t make for the best use of our bandwidth

So we’ve been sitting on our paws since then, listening to user reuqests to buy Dogster and Catster branded photo items until Zazzle let have early access to their product API. We’ve sold over 100 custom t-shirts, mugs and stamps that optionally include our logo, their pet’s name and their pet’s Dogster or Catster URL. It’s as easy as picking a photo, selecting which style mug or shirt and ordering the item. There are more details about the API at Yahoo! PR News.

The best part is that the quality has met every member’s approval, this production time is under 48 hours and the shipping is fast. Both Dogsters and Catster have already posted and tagged photos of their Zazzle items. Here are some snippets from the forums:

Even better, kick things off right, Zazzle sponsored two pet photos contests Dogster’s Dog Days of Summer and Catster’s Hot Paws of Summer. The winners’ pet images will appear on Zazzle’s homepage and all entrants get a 15% discount on every Zazzle item they buy!

To try it out now, just follow the links from your dog’s or cat’s page on our sites. Woof and meow!

Too many young web projects and companies put off considering and protecting their intellectual property with trademarks and wordmarks. It’s very easy for a project with no money and no background in legal issues to put such concerns towards the bottom of the list. I also know that many people think getting a domain name some how guarentees them the right to use that name. I think many people also think that the anti-squating laws in regards to domain names are equally just in regards to trademarks. They aren’t and it’s very easy for anyone with no product or company to tie up a mark for years.

If that doesn’t motivate you I can say that within 30 days of my submitting marks for Dogster, another company tried to get a mark in a related area which could have led to a ‘likelihood of confusion’ situation that may have blocked us from using our own name. Had I waited until Dogster was live for 4 months instead of 3, I could have lost usage of the term.

What I really should have done - and what everyone should do the minute they commit to a new project - was submit an Intent to Use request once there is a name, term or trademark you think you’ll be using. If approved that simple submission can give you right-of-precedence, even over someone with a nationwide product. Before committing to any name or term in the U.S. use the US Patent and Trademark Office’s excellent search engine to see existing usage near your words. You’ll have to get an expert to review any artwork your are comparing, but if you are really comitting to something, it’s worth the effort.

I was motivated to write this after reading one of the few thorough entires on the topic I have ever seen. Check out Stephen Nipper’s article ‘Trademark tips for your web app‘ at the excellent Think Vitamin site. He’s even answering direct questions in the comments so maybe he’ll hook you up.

Actually, that is a very tongue-in-jowl title as around here we consider ourselves very Web 2.0, assuming you define Web 2.0 as a self-funded, customer-serving, profitability-focused, technology-enabled company.

But, I have to chuckle a little bit when I announce that after a year of supporting photo tags, we now offer a nifty tag cloud to see the most popular ones. So to answer Animal Control’s question, yes all our pets are tagged.

Don’t miss ‘happy father’s day‘ and ‘halloween‘.

Here are the most pawpular dog photo tags:

Adopt 06 Baby ball bath Beach beagle bed birthday boxer chihuahua Christmas close up costume couch Cute Dog Face family friends grass Halloween happy Lab Little Bit Nap Time outside park play playing pool Posing pug puppy relaxing Resting running sitting Sleep sleeping Sleepy smile smiling Snow swimming tired tongue Toy water We love dad 06 We love mom 06

Here are the most pawpular cat photo tags:

Baby bed Black black cat box calico Cat Chair Christmas close up computer couch Cute Dog eyes Face friends funny Halloween hiding kitten Kitty lazy lounging love maine coon MEOW nap napping orange outside play playing Posing relaxing siamese Sink sitting Sleep sleeping Sleepy Sun Tabby tongue Toy We love dad 06 We love mom 06 White Window yawn

… getting comments like these after having to work through the night (and into the morning) to resolve an upgrade that died mid-process and poisoned the rest of the system.

Everybody at our house LOVES Dogster! So when you guys have to do “work” on the site and are down for a while…we understand! So please, no more tails between your legs on being down….barks happen! Woofs and wet kisses….ChiChi ( we miss you terribly), Opal and Olive

You guys are the best, we appreciate everything you do.

Thank’s HQ for all your hard work..
Mommie was having Dogster D.T.”s though..

Mom says it was good that Dogster was down today, ’cause she actually got something accomplished at work!

Thanks HQ for fixing everything and working so hard to make this the best site ever!
We love you guys!

ARooRrrooooroooo! Thank you HQ!!!

Yeah, about that downtime this morning…if anyone has a hissy fit (sorry, just HAD to say it) about it, then they need to grab a bit of The ‘Nip and chill out on the sofa. You guys are awesome — thanks for putting something together that makes a LOT of people happy (AND it’s FREE!!). Purrs to you…Mom to Malaika, Mara, Camila ,Lillie, Emma, and Jake (whew — no wonder I’m tired!!)

Thanks a bunch, HQ! We were with you right up to the second the site went down, being semi-insomniacs! BOL!

We’re sorry y’all had troubles, but want to send our gratitude for running such a great site. Considering how many dogs are on here, etc…etc… there is hardly any “down time” to speak of! I wish I could say that for other sites! BOL!

Here’s a HUGE cyber-rosette, and loads of bones just for y’all!

In fact I’d say this was rewarding, but we let them down too much in the first place ;>

We had a wooftastic good time at the Giant’s Game Saturday at Pac Bell Park here in SF. The whole team showed including the Dogster Dog, spouses and kids. Everyone assumes the person in the Dogster Dog suit drew the short straw, but it’s a ton of fun and I volunteered for the stint.

Children are drawn to you like candy and look at wonder at the impossibly huge dog. Dogs either want to jump and play or give you a wide bearth. But the owners love letting their dog try out this new experience.

Big dog woof thanks to the exceptional Wag Hotels, you gotta check out their doggie hotel, and we have to bark we ran into Emily Scott Pottruck, Kyra and Chalcy and Miss Fido Manners.

Okay, enough with the woofing, let’s see more pictures!

…. a multi-hour process halting on your biggest database table on your master database at 3am that throws all your database slaves out of whack. Perseverence is … rebuilding that huge table and index files from a backup (you always make backups before you do anything big right?) Happiness is … putting everything back together perfectly, getting the site back online and returning to one’s much more prosasic tasks (like launching IM ;)

Our sincere apologies to all our beloved members and fans who we let down last night.

And a note to anyone starting small with big plans. Once your database tables start getting above 10Gb your options for working with them become significantly reduced. Keep a keen eye open for the tables that grow much faster than others as they’ll no longer play nice like the little ones do.

Our tail is between our legs, but the site has been working fine now and it is definitely better than ever.