Do you love pets and writing? Then there’s nothing more exciting than starting your own pet blog.
While writing may not be the first career choice for many, it certainly comes with numerous perks and benefits that you can realize after months as an established blogger. Not only will you be doing something you love, but you’ll also manage to make a living out of it!
If you thought there’s no way you can make money blogging, we’re here to tell you otherwise. Here’s how to start a pet blog of your very own!
The Different Types of Pet Blogs
Pet bloggers – and the people who wish to start a pet blog – have a lot of things to learn before going ahead and starting their blog. One of the most important things to understand is that a pet blog can be approached in a number of ways.
By understanding how each type of pet blog works, you will have a better idea of how to get started.
Personal Pet Blogs
One of the most common blogging methods is simply posting a personal blog. This kind of blog may cover your personal experiences with your pets, blogs talking about your pet’s usual habits, your grooming methods, and more.
However, sticking to a niche topic is vital when you’re building a personal blog. You could easily branch off into multiple topics such as pet food choices, grooming tips, best products, or something extremely random like a day out with your pooch, which may not offer any valuable information to a reader other than making them go “awwww.”
If you’ve chosen a niche, make sure you stick to it so that you not only offer relevant information to the readers visiting your blog, but also earn through affiliate marketing! We’ll cover more on that later.
Pet News Blogs
A news blog, as the name suggests, is a blog that portrays a lot of gathered information attractively. These blogs help provide additional information to pet owners everywhere by curating news and other information from a number of articles and hyperlinking certain words to take readers on to the original article. This not only improves their own site visits, but also that of the original posters, while giving them all the information they need.
With relevant outbound links, the chances of your blog ranking high among search results are excellent. However, there is a method involved in creating a news blog. You certainly do not want to be branded as someone who plagiarizes content. The key is to use these articles to give out your insights that lead the readers on to the page with the additional information.
As a niche pet blogger, you can talk about pets of a certain breed, keeping the content relevant to your audience in more ways than one.
Pet Business Blogs
For people who are interested in making money blogging, finding out how much affiliate marketers make is more than enough to get them started on their own blog. And businesses do benefit a great deal from blogging, there’s no doubt about it!
If you offer any kind of pet-related services like pet sitting, dog walking, or fostering for pets, then creating a blog gives you a place where you can talk about your services. It also lets you offer some special tips you know that many might be unaware of, establishing your credibility and giving potential customers reason to entrust you with their furry friends!
Pet Authority Blog
An authority blog is a large trusted website about a topic. These sites are informative and well-sourced.
By offering insights on everything pet-related, you increase your blog’s credibility and get people to trust you for your opinion. Crucially, when people turn to you for your advice, they’re more likely to subscribe to your email list, click on your affiliate links, and buy your products.
So, if you are an expert at dealing with cocker spaniels, from training them and taking care of them to identifying the right products needed to keep them happy and healthy, you can create a comprehensive authority site offering insightful tips to spaniel owners.
If you have expertise in nurturing and dealing with pets, or in purchasing a certain type of pet product, it makes a lot of sense to start an authoritative blog. Reading up on our guide to building an authority site to help you establish your own blog site and get going in the right direction.
Take a moment to think about your interests, existing competencies, and ideal audience. This exercise will help you figure out what kind of pet blog you should go ahead with.
How to Start a Pet Blog Step-by-Step
For people with a flair for writing and a love for pets, starting a pet blog may lead to a career doing what you love – and earning enough to keep doing it! While social media is an active platform for most pet lovers, blogging is an equally vital source for most pet owners to answer all their burning questions on pet care, and to get their daily dose of adorable cat photos.
Here’s our step-by-step guide for starting a pet blog and making money with it!
Step 1: Choose Your Pet Blog Niche
If you want to find out how to start a pet blog, then you probably own a pet, cater to pets, or are actively involved in the welfare of pets. Deciding on a niche depends on which of these categories you fall under.
As a pet owner, you may not have the gravitas to give out tips or suggestions that must only come from a professional vet or someone in a similar field. Similarly, you wouldn’t solely focus on talking about how cute a pup really is when you can talk about welfare organizations that are striving to create a safer world for our lovely furry friends.
Even within a niche category, there is a lot you can do to make your blog all the more successful and reliable by narrowing down the niche to talk solely about certain breeds, products, etc.
For example, if you own a cocker spaniel or are an expert in training or treating spaniels, you can focus your niche on this particular breed, making it so other cocker spaniel owners look to your blog for advice. You could also make a blog all about dog collars or cat food!
Step 2: Choose a Brand Name
Once you have the niche in mind for your pet blog, you can move on to naming your brand.
Now, while we DO take your love and passion for your fur babies seriously, it is best to choose a name that doesn’t take itself too seriously. A short and adorable name for your brand can go a long way in creating brand recall.
Your readers are more likely to remember a name that is quirky than something as plain and boring as The Dog Shop.
Here are a few examples you could consider as a niche brand name for your blog:
- All About Spaniels
- Pug Penchant
- Fur Baby Toys
- The Purr Store
For someone who wants to choose an even more niche topic, focusing on a particular product such as a dog harness, consider looking at topic keywords in your niche and creating a brand that’s an exact match keyword. This should help you with ranking high in Google and being among the top sites people visit when reading up on dog harnesses (or whatever topic you’ve chosen to focus on).
Step 3: Install WordPress on Your Web Host
There are a number of web hosts available out there that come with their own features and USPs. The easiest way to go about it is installing WordPress on your web host. Not only you choose from a number of themes but also start a pet blog free of cost.
Once you have installed WordPress, all you need to do is choose a domain name and continue the installation.
Step 4: Decide on a Pet Blog Theme
WordPress offers a number of themes that you can choose from, absolutely free. One way to be sure that you are choosing the right theme for your blog is to stick to a pet theme that is closest to the niche and domain you have decided on.
Step 5: Do Thorough Keyword Research
Keyword research is, by far, the most vital factor when writing blog posts. Sticking to exact match keywords and long-tail keywords is a great way to ensure that your blog ranks higher in the search engine results.
Keeping locations in mind and using keywords that are as specific as possible will help you ensure you can incorporate the right set of keywords in your blog.
For example, if your focus is a dog blog and you intend to write about a niche topic such as “How to Groom your Cocker Spaniel at Home,” this post will talks about the use of specific grooming products, you can use keywords like –
- grooming products for cocker spaniels
- best dog collars for cocker spaniels
- cocker spaniel grooming products in Berkeley
- dog walkers for Berkeley cocker spaniels
Using a location-specific keyword can help you better reach your audience, especially if you run a local pet business and are looking for customers in your area. You can also experiment with keywords in order to make the blog as relevant to your target audience and help reach the right kind of audience.
To get started, make use of keyword research tools that not only help you find the best keywords to make use of but also help you come up with relevant topics. We like Ahrefs the best for keyword research, but there are plenty of great ones out there to choose from.
In general, the simplicity of these tools makes them easy to start using, even for beginners!
Step 6: Write Relevant Content
The kind of content you write can change how your audience perceives you. No matter what degree you hold, your knowledge about pets and your ability to communicate that knowledge through words can help you become an expert in the niche of your choice!
The most important rule when writing a blog post is keeping the content relevant to your audience’s search intent and what they really care about. And along with that, focus on building a connection with your readers. Be as simple as your can in your writing, making it conversational, witty, and fun.
And it should go without saying, but use terms more commonly used by pet lovers. This will help with SEO and make your content more relatable too.
Step 7: Monetize the Pet Blog
One of the best things about being a successful blogger is being able to earn money doing what you love. There a number of ways to monetize your pet blog, and all methods are easy to manage once you understand how they work.
Here are some of the most profitable ways to monetize your blog:
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate links allow you to promote products and services through your blog, helping you earn a commission on every successful sale. With a number of big and small brands offering affiliate programs that bloggers can be a part of, the opportunity to earn through blogging is massive. Understanding how to write content for affiliate marketing can help you get started with ease.
Ads
Allowing sponsor ads to be showcased on your site is yet another way to monetize your blog. With tens of thousands of visitors to your site, you can easily earn thousands per month just through display ads! Establishing your blog is key to making high profits through display ads.
Sponsors
Did you know you can find sponsors? Sometimes known as advertorials, this is when you post content on your blog that’s specifically designed to promote a company’s products and services. Sponsorships bring in a great deal of income, and all from just a few key partnerships.
All of these steps are enough to help you set up your blog and eventually monetize it. However, there are a number of other things you need to consider as a pet blogger, which we will take a long look at below.
What to Consider as a Pet Blogger
While you may be aware of how to get started with your pet blog, you must also get acquainted with the important factors that every blogger must keep in mind. Be sure to think about each of these as you set about planning your blogging business.
Identify Your Reasons for Blogging
What has made you consider blogging? Is it you clicking a thousand pictures every time your pet so much as breathes? Or it is the hilarious anecdotes you have stored in your mind for every time your pet did something amusing?
Your reason to get started can help you choose the right niche and brand name. Most personal pet bloggers stick to picture blogs that involve endless pictures of their fur babies posing, which is a totally different way of approaching it from thinking about profitability first.
And yet, while money is important, that’s not enough of a reason to make a blog. Think about what you can do Your reasons and the route you wish to take can help you establish your blog within a particular niche and make a difference in the lives.
And the best part? You can make money blogging and doing what you love!
Cater to Your Readers
Knowing who you write for is a powerful tool. As a pet blogger, you may be under the assumption that you are reaching the right audience. However, a number of people who adore pets or own pets may casually scroll through your blog without gleaning any relevant information, solely because their pet breed differs from yours, or they prefer cats over dogs.
For blogs that are generic and cater to pets as a whole, talking about paw balms, fur oil, and more, any pet owners may visit the blog and learn what they need to. However, niche blogs work differently.
For example, you may have chosen to start a blog about how to train and take care of cocker spaniels. But your audience may range from cat owners to people who prefer keeping birds as pets. In such a case, your blog would hardly benefit a large part of your audience unless you focus on keyword research.
Keep your blogs as specific as you can to cater to your particular readers, rather than pet owners in general.
Keep Things Interesting
How well you manage to keep the interest of your readers will determine how successful your pet blog will be. Look for topics that hold other pet lovers’ interests. Use tools like BuzzSumo to find out about trending topics and ideas that you can use to create content.
Post grooming tutorials, best products for your pets, etc. that are likely to interest readers AND provide valuable information.
To help you get started, here’s a list of some helpful topics you can cover within your blog, depending on your niche.
- Pet products
- Pet-friendly holidays
- Potty training your pets
- Behavioral training
- Pet food recipes
- Pet health tips
- Personal experiences
- Community outreach for pets
Stand with Animal Welfare Organizations
One way to really make an impression as a blogger and lover of animals is by associating and volunteering with animal welfare organizations that help take care of abused and orphaned animals and find them a new home.
This way, you not only reach out to those actively involved in animal welfare, but also others who have the means and the passion to contribute. Acting as a mediator, you can help the right people connect, bringing in more active volunteers to these organizations and helping them thrive.
The organic reach of your blog is bound to grow multifold when you associate yourself and your blog with many such activities involving pets, improving your social life both physically and digitally.
Offer Relevant Tips and Suggestions
Coming from a fellow pet owner or a pet expert, any suggestion would seem like a good one that is tried and tested. Unlike going about their own research about certain products for their furry companions, most pet owners prefer asking other pet owners for opinions and reviews.
Like any of us shopping online looking long and hard at product reviews, a pet owner should come to rely on your blog for suggestions about what to do about a certain issue they are facing with their pup, kitty, or other pet.
Say, for example, you have dealt with a habit your spaniel displayed that someone else reading your blog is dealing with, they are more likely to look to you for tips and other suggestions, knowing that you were successfully able to get your pup through the issue.
Talk About Affiliate Products
Not many understand how crucial affiliate marketing is, not only to the business being promoted, but also to the blogger promoting the brand. Apart from widening your scope of experiences, you get to enjoy a number of perks.
While pet blogging, you can talk about pet products and services that every pet owner should know more about, and even promote yourself as a credible source for pet advice while you’re at it. Every time someone clicks one of your affiliate links and makes a purchase, you make money!
Add Cutesy Pictures!
Anyone who follows a pet page knows the adorableness that oozes out of every single picture posted. One way to keep your readers’ attention as a pet blogger is to add cute and wholesome pictures of pets! Just be sure to maintain high quality in your blog posts too.
Ultimately, while the pictures may draw their attention, your blog content is what will keep them hooked on the page.
Pet Blogging Wrap-up…
All you need to be a successful pet blogger is to get started, keep blogging, stay up-to-date with the latest trends, and find unique ways to monetize your blog.
And now that you know all you need to, get started with your pet blog and share your knowledge!
