Are you looking for a way to turn your love of animals into a lucrative career? Do you have an exisiting pet business such as a grooming salon, dog-walking business or online pet store and are looking for more ways to connect with your customers? Or do you just love sharing your love of pets with others? If you can say YES! to any of the above you definitely should consider starting a pet blog. Starting your own pet blog is super quick and easy, and you can start your own money-making business right now, for just a few dollars a month!
Why start a pet blog?
One of the biggest benefits of creating a pet blogging business is that is you can work from home, you can travel when and where you like without having to be tied to an office, and you can create your own a flexible schedule.
And 2019 is the perfect time to start a pet blog – the pet industry has been experiencing explosive growth. According to The American Pet Products Association, almost 85 million households have a pet and over the last 30 years, pet ownership has gone from 56% to 68% of all households. Some of the changes in pet ownership are due to technology and the advent of online purchasing, meaning that there are many more people out there who want to read, learn about and discuss their pets online, and blogs are the perfect platform to capitalize on this demand!
What should your pet blog be about?
Anything! Pet lovers have wide-ranging interests, and you are bound to find an audience even for your most niche pet interests. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking:
- dog behavior
- dog nutrition
- training your dog for obedience
- training service or therapy dogs
- how to start a dog walking business
- a ‘personality’ blog for your pet (think Doug the Pug or Grumpy Cat R.I.P)
- information about dog breeds and their history
- reviews of dog products such as toys or bedding
- informative posts on dog health
You may think some of these sound a little silly, or that there are already blogs out there with this information. It may shock you to learn that over 10 MILLION people search the term “dog breeds” every year and over 2 MILLION searches for “best dog food” – there are plenty of people out there ready to read your blog if you have something interesting to write.
How can you make money from your blog?
Blogs can be incredibly profitable. Many niche blogs make many thousands of dollars a month and typically this is a combination of advertising like Google Adsense, which uses it own algorithm to automate display ads it feels will be relevant to your audience, and other income streams like educational content or a product you can sell. You are paid per page view and can apply as soon as your blog is getting 30 views a day, which is quite possible to achieve within a few weeks once your blog is live.
You can also offer sponsored posts by partnering up with companies that you think would be of interest to your readers and selling them advertising space on your blog, either through an actual graphic advertisement or an informational post or review about their product. Always be transparent with your readers if you are accepting money or free products in return for advertising, and only partner with companies you genuinely feel will be of benefit to your readers. There is no quicker way to lose credibility then to ‘sell-out’ and promote products you would never use yourself.
The other common way to make money from your pet blog is by creating an educational course for your readers. If you have a lot of experience in training dogs this could be a ‘Basic Obedience for Puppies’ training program, which would be a great resource for people who don’t live near an obedience club but still want to work on training their puppy.
If you have started a successful pet-based business, like dog walking or grooming, you could share your experience and make a course using a platform like Thinkific about how to start a pet business and mentor and coach others to do the same.
Imagine if you sold only 100 of your courses each month for $50 – that’s $5000 a month! And the best thing about a blog based course is that once you have written the content you can sit back and relax, as it becomes a passive income stream and allows you to focus on growing your business further in other ways.
If you have an existing ‘bricks and mortar’ business like a grooming salon or pet store, creating a pet blog can be a great way to increase your customer base as people will find and share your posts, giving you great publicity and increasing your influence as a respected and knowledgeable source of information.
For those with an online store selling pet products adding a blog to your exisiting site is a very effective way to increase your traffic and sales, as the search engines view informative content very favourably, and your site will rank higher on search engines like Google. If you produce interesting articles that are relevant to your customers they are likely to be shared on social media, increasing your reach and bringing you new customers.
How to start a pet blog
Starting a pet blog is easy – all you need is a domain name, some web hosting and you can get started!
We use Bluehost as they are one of the top web hosting companies around, and provide a very user-friendly interface. You can start your own blog with them for as low as $2.75 a month including your domain name! You can host your blog on WordPress, which is one of the most popular platforms for blogging due to its highly adaptable nature and the fact that many of the add-ons (known as plugins) are free. WordPress was originally developed as a blogging platform an offers by far one of the cleanest, fastest ways to write and publish blog posts, and that’s all included right from the start. You can use a free template, or purchase a custom template like this one that The Daily Pup uses. If you use BlueHost your new pet blog will be integrated with WordPress and everything will be set up and ready to go within hours!
You will need to choose a domain name, this is included free of charge with BlueHost, and you can begin setting up your site and add your domain name later if you need a little more time to think. We recommend using a .com or .net domain name as the search engines seem to like these better.
If you want to use a more ‘what you see is what you get’ type interface you might like to consider Wix – a free, user-friendly, website building platform. Wix allows you to create amazing, professional-looking sites, which can be updated and edited with ease – no technical skills required! What’s more, they promise their sites are built to be search engine friendly so readers can find you through Google. Weebly offers a similar service to Wix and has over 50 million users across the world.
Useful tools for your pet blog
One of the best ways to connect and build your readership is through an email list. This allows you to contact your readers directly and develop and relationship with them by sharing content they are interested in, such as dog training tips or information on dog health. This can be time-consuming to manage, especially as your audience grows so we have found using a tool like Convert Kit to be really helpful as it automates the entire process and you can also use it to create sign-up forms and landing pages all in the one program.
Most of the Daily Pup readers find us through Pinterest, and we have just started using Tailwind to automate and schedule all of the ‘pins’ we want to post. Pinterest likes you to post regularly (like, 5+ times a day!) which is very time-consuming! Tailwind is great because you can create all your pins once a week and then they will be posted automatically at the best times for your audience to see them.
Good luck + Happy Blogging!
Would you like to learn more about pet blogging? Let us know below and we will share information on blogging more soon!