The Benefits of Pet Blogging: How to Get Started

Why You Should Start a Pet Blog

On average, dog owners spend around $1200 per year on their pets, and cat owners spend around $680 per year.

That being said, the pet industry is a thriving place to earn a living. Plus, every day, there is someone new to owning a pet who will need help answering their questions. This is where your pet blog comes into play!

Starting a pet blog can be a fun and rewarding experience. Plus, the pet niche is gaining in popularity year over year, now is the BEST time to start. Here are some reasons why you should stop waiting and create a pet blog today:

1. Passion for pets: If you have a love and passion for pets, then starting a pet blog can be a great outlet to share your knowledge and experiences with others who share the same love for pets.
2. Build a community: A pet blog can be a platform for pet owners to connect, exchange ideas and support each other. It can also be a place for pet enthusiasts to learn from one another and build a strong community.
3. Personal fulfillment: Writing a pet blog can bring a sense of personal fulfillment as you share your experiences and insights with others. It can also be a great way to improve your writing and video skills while creatively expressing yourself.
4. Potential to make a living: When your pet blog gains popularity and attracts a large following, there will be opportunities to monetize your blog through sponsored content, advertisements, or product promotions. You could even start your own online business in the pet niche.
5. Raise awareness: A pet blog can also raise awareness about pet-related issues and encourage pet owners to take better care of their pets. You can convince others to adopt an abandoned pet rather than buy from breeders.

Starting a pet blog can be a fun and rewarding experience that allows you to share your love for pets, build a community, and make a living from your passion.

What You Need to Know Before Getting Started

Before you start your pet blog, it’s essential to understand the basics of blogging. Let’s go over the key things you need to know that will get your pet blog up and running.

Choose a platform

One of the most popular platforms for blogging is WordPress. It’s a free platform with tons of templates, plugins, and communities to answer any questions you might have. You will need to find a hosting provider if you choose WordPress.

If you are more tech-savvy and have HTML, CSS, and javascript knowledge, I recommend using Webflow. It is a visual editing software that gives you total control over how your site looks.

Setup your pet blog

Now that you have a platform, you will need to start customizing the design and layout of your pet blog. Whether using WordPress or Webflow, they have prebuilt templates to help get you up and running in just a couple of hours.

If you are going to use a template, try to find one slightly different from the top pet blogs to help make yours feel unique and fresh.

Keep in mind that your blog needs to offer a great user experience, load fast, and be able to capture your visitors' information through a subscription form.

Start creating content

The heart of a blog is content. This is where you will need to use tools like Moz, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, and Answer The Public to figure out what your fellow pet lovers are searching for online.

Keep in mind the best-performing content comes in the form of “how to” and “best” articles. Those are the two main search terms in today's search-driven world. To give you a couple of examples:

• “How to teach a dog to roll over.”
• “Best carrier for cats who hate carriers”

Those are just a couple of examples to help get your creative juices flowing.

If you want a more in-depth guide, you can check out my article on how to start a blog. It goes into more detail on the best practices for your future pet blog.

How to Choose a Niche for Your Pet Blog

You might be thinking that a pet blog is a niche. Technically you are right, but when you are trying to speak to everyone, you are actually talking to no one. 

Meaning, when you go too broad in the beginning, it will be nearly impossible to build an audience and traction for your pet blog.

Narrow it down by type of pet

Start to think about what type of animal you are most in love with. Think about what kind of pet you have the most experience with and one that you could write about for months without getting paid.

If you love all animals and can’t choose which one to start with, try this little trick:

1. Write down your top three animal choices.
2. Think about which one you would like to write about the least.
3. Grab a coin (no, seriously, grab a coin).
4. Decide which pet choice is heads and which one is tails.
5. Flip the coin and let fate decide for you!

That might sound a bit crazy, but trust me. I use this technique more often than you think.

If you want to narrow it down further, you can start to think of certain things you might have tried searching for in the past but couldn’t find quite what you wanted, or maybe you have people coming to you for specific advice about their pet.

To help you start the brainstorming process, I will list a few pet blog niche ideas for you to either steal or point you in the right direction.

• Exotic pet care and health
• Small animal behavior and training
• Service and therapy pets
• Aquatic pet hobbyist
• Horse riding and care
• Rodent and small mammal care
• Feline behavior and health
• Bird keeping blog
• Dog sports and activities
• Pet photography blog
• Pet-friendly home decor and landscaping

I hope that list will help get your creative juices flowing! Now, on to the next section.

The Pros and Cons of Pet Blogging

To help make your decision even easier, I want to share a full list of the pros and cons with starting a pet blogging business.

Yes, there are more pros than cons, but it’s always nice to see both sides of a new venture.

Pros of pet blogging

• Flexibility to set your own schedule and work anywhere you like.
• Ability to start the business on the side of your full time job at home.
• Minimal startup costs, as little as $200.
• It can be rewarding doing something you love.
• You have the ability to scale your pet blog into a larger business in the future.
• No overhead costs unless you want to have an office and employees.
• High-profit margins since you aren’t selling physical products.
• You are your own boss and can build your pet blog how you see fit.
• You can help others with their pet needs.
• You will become an expert and go to in your pet niche.
• Multiple channels exist to make money; courses, affiliate marketing, and more.

Cons of pet blogging

• It can take a lot of work to build an audience at first.
• You need to consistently create content to keep up with other pet blogs.
• It will be tough to generate revenue at first.
• Building the trust of your audience will be challenging in the beginning.
• It will take up most of your free time to get it started.
• If you are not good at writing, the success curve will take longer.
• Technically issues can be challenging if you aren’t tech-savvy.

Tips for Writing Engaging Pet Blog Posts

When writing content for your pet blog, it’s important to make sure that it is engaging, informative, and skimmable. 

A few tips for writing the most engaging pots for your pet blog are:

• Share relatable stories that solve a problem.
• Create posts that solve questions like “how to treat your dog's ear infection without a vet.”
• Create posts that offer round-up posts like “the best cat carriers your cat wants to go in.”
• Write as though you are speaking to one person to keep it engaging.
• Make sure to use quality graphics and videos throughout your post that allows your readers to engage with your content.
• Ensure your headline grabs people’s attention and makes them want to click on your blog post.

There are many ways to create engaging content, but these are my top six tips. Let’s move on to the next section.

How to Promote Your Pet Blog

Promoting your pet blog can be a great way to reach a wider audience and share your love and knowledge of pets with others. It is also essential if you want to make sure your audience and customer base grow.

Here are some tips to help you effectively promote your pet blog, even if you are just starting out:

1. Utilize Social Media: Share your blog posts on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. You should be sharing value-driven content in the form of reels or carousels. 
2. Guest Posting: Reach out to other pet bloggers and websites in your niche and offer to write a guest post for them. This can help you gain new followers and reach an audience that isn’t aware of your pet blog yet.
3. Collaborate: Partner with pet-related brands and offer to review their products or services on your blog. This can help you reach a wider audience and bring in some extra income. (If you are just starting out, reach out to new brands and store owners)
4. SEO Optimization: Ensure that your blog is optimized for search engines so that when people search for pet-related topics, your blog will appear near the top of the search results. If you need help with SEO, you can check out my article on how to do SEO yourself.
5. Participate in Pet-Related Communities: Join communities on Facebook Groups that are related to your niche and share your expertise. Make sure you aren’t just self-promoting but also engaging with others in the group and answering their questions.
6. Offer Newsletter Subscriptions: Encourage your readers to sign up for your newsletter so you can keep them updated on your latest posts and offers. Giving away a free guide or digital asset is a great way to entice people to join your newsletter.
7. Host Giveaways: Hosting giveaways can be a great way to gain more followers and create buzz around your blog. Offer pet-related products or services as prizes to incentivize people to follow and share your blog. At the end of the day, EVERYONE loves free stuff.

There are more moving parts to a pet blog than you know, but these are some of the best ways to grow your blog and start making a living from it in the 2020s.

Networking with Others In The Pet Niche

One of the hardest things for most people to do, but one of the best ways to grow, is networking and building relationships.

Most people get it all wrong by reaching out to people and start talking about themselves and what they do. You need to realize that someone that doesn’t know you won’t care. It’s harsh, but it’s the truth.

Let me share a simple outline that will give you the upper hand when it comes to networking with others in the pet niche.

Tips to reach out and build relationships

• When reaching out, make it personal and about them, don’t talk about you or your pet blog.
• Offer something of value to them. Maybe you can fix their website for free or offer one of your services for free.
• Use the “friend in common” method. If you can link the person you are reaching out to, to a mutual friend, trust is instantly there.
• Be respectful, and do not harass them with tons of messages if they do not answer you.
• If you are sending cold DMs or emails, DO NOT copy and paste a template without personalizing it. 

Networking is the best way to help grow your audience, business, and influence. Just remember it will take time and consistency, so don’t give up after the first ten messages or emails you send.

Best Practices for Monetizing Your Pet Blog

Many new bloggers tend to create a few pieces of content and then blanket their site with Adsense Ads and expect to make tons of money.

The cold hard truth is this doesn’t work. Plus, it gives a very poor user experience for your readers. Think about the last website you visited with tons of ads in your face. It’s frustrating right?

I will go over a few best practices when it comes to monetizing your pet blog.

Get your content to rank first

Before you think about adding banner ads or affiliate marketing links to your post, you need to make sure it is ranking first.

There is no point in adding all these revenue streams when no one is visiting your blog post.

If you are diligent with building your pet blog, you should start to think about monetizing after the 4th to 6th month of starting. By this point, you will have blog posts ranking and bringing in a decent amount of traffic.

Join affiliate marketing programs

One of the best affiliate marketing programs when starting out, especially for pet blogging, is Amazon.com Associates.

The reason why it’s one of the best is that it’s very easy to get started, and you have hundreds of thousands of products to suggest to your audience.

Once you have joined Amazon.com Associates, you will be able to visit any product page and copy an affiliate link to insert into your blog post.

The best part about Amazon is that when someone clicks on your link to buy a dog collar if they decide to get groceries at the same time, you will also be given a commission on whatever else is in their cart at that time.

Offer professional pet services

Now that your pet blog is gaining traction and popularity, you can now offer professional pet services to your readers.

Whether you want to offer pet sitting, dog walking, or grooming services, the sky is the limit once you have taken the time to build your pet blog.

Offer sponsored posts for pet companies

Once your pet blog has over 10k monthly visits, you can start to reach out to pet companies to see if they would consider paying you to write a sponsored post on a product or service they offer.

Typically you will see a roundup post of the ten best pet fur products, and usually, the number one spot is paid by that company on a monthly basis.

Display Ads

I put this last for a reason.

If you want your site to be known as a quality pet blog, then you should not litter your site with ads.

In fact, you should only choose certain posts to display ads and do so in a very minimal way.

The only posts I recommend displaying ads on our posts where affiliate links just don’t make sense. This is when you display a couple of ads to help bring in revenue from a post that is getting some traffic to it.

A few ad networks I recommend are:

• Ezoic
• Mediavine
• AdThrive
• Google Adsense

While these methods can be lucrative if done correctly, it’s important to make sure that they are in line with the goals of your blog and that they don’t detract from the user experience.

Keys to Growing Your Audience

The best way to grow your audience and subscriber base is consistency. You need to be publishing content regularly in order for readers to keep coming back. 

Having an opt-in form on your pet blog is essential to growing your audience and subscriber base. The best way to get people to sign up for your newsletter is by giving them something of value for free.
For example, since you are going to start a pet blog, you could offer a guide on “what to expect when expecting a puppy.”

Pet blogging is a great way to start making money through the one thing you truly love, PETS!