Pet Blogging Guide [7 Easy Steps For How to Start a Pet Blog And Make Money Online]

Pet blogging is the perfect way to turn your love of pets and pet-focused knowledge into a source of income. Is this something you've ever considered?

Pet ownership increased during the pandemic – which means there are a lot more people living with pets, searching online for pet-related information and products, and who are members of a large pet-focused community.

With that knowledge, I'd guess that today might be a better time than ever before to start your own pet blog.

At the end, we've included some of the best pet blogs on the internet to give you inspiration. Let's dive in.

The Benefits of Pet Blogging

If you love pets, love making extra money, and love the internet, pet blogging is perfect for you.

There's no other side hustle where you can literally be paid to talk about pets all the time.

Plus, the global pet industry is worth $261 billion.

If you have veterinary or pet health experience, you can take it a step further by providing medical advice and solutions about pet health to your readers.

However, you don't have to be a vet to reach animal lovers and have a successful pet blog. Some of the most successful and popular vet blogs online today are written and maintained by pet parents who are simply passionate about pets.

So, to sum up the benefits, you can:

• Make money by talking about pets all day, every day
• Help other pet owners with their questions and problems
• Share photos and stories of your own pets to people who love to see them – aka not your friends who are tired of seeing photos of your cats (I kid, I kid)
• Create a long-term sustainable business that you can run for years to come, or sell on a website-flipping marketplace

How Do Pet Bloggers Make Money?

The easiest ways to make money with a pet blog as a beginner will be with advertising and affiliate marketing.

Signing up for an ad network is pretty easy, and once you have ads on your website, you don't have to touch them.

They make money every time a visitor sees them, so they're pretty passive. However, you need a decent amount of traffic to make a good income from ads.

Affiliate marketers get paid every time someone purchases a product from their recommendation.

To learn more about affiliate marketing, check out our complete guide below.

How Much Money Can You Make From Pet Blogging?

The answer to how much money you can make from pet blogging isn't one single answer. Honestly, the sky is the limit.

Your income potential will be affected by several factors, like:

• How much traffic your website gets
• Whether or not you're building an email list
• How you monetize (ads, affiliate marketing, etc)

Some blogs only monetize with ads and although they can make a decent income once their traffic ramps up, you can multiply your earnings by adding other streams of income like affiliate marketing, private labeling your own merchandise, accepting sponsorships, and the like.

It's hard to find income reports from pet bloggers, but they're out there. I found an income report from a pet blogger who runs the website “You Did What With Your Wiener?”

The niche doesn't really matter when it comes to monetizing a website. Every website can make money, and a lot of it.

Spencer Haws (founder of Niche Pursuits) wrote an article about how much his website project was making from 10,000 visitors a day.

Pet Blogging Guide: How to Start Your Pet Blog

So you're a pet owner and you want to start a pet blog… where to start? The following sections outline the 7 main steps required to starting and running a successful pet blog.

1. Pick a Niche

The first thing you need to do is pick a niche. A niche is like a topic or category. And yes, “pets” is a niche, but you can go even further.

Piggybacking on the income report example from earlier, You Did What With Your Wiener is not just a pet blog, it's a dog blog. And it's not for just any dog owners, it's a wiener dog blog.

And, it's not just a wiener dog blog either! It's a blog about hiking and camping with your wiener dog. That's very specific.

The more specific you get, the more money you have the opportunity to make.

Have you ever heard the saying “The riches are in the niches?”

The more specific and laser-focused you get, the more likely you are to find people who really connect with your content.

If you just have a general pet blog, you can still do well.

But if you have a blog about hiking with cats, other people who want to learn how to hike with their cats are going to be excited to finally find someone who gets them and wants to help.

So, first, pick your niche!

If you don't have an idea for a super specific niche yet, don't worry. You can always start as a general pet blog or general dog or cat blog, and then niche down later on when you find something you love to write about.

2. Get a Domain Name

Next it's time to pick your domain name, or your URL, aka the place where your blog will live on the internet.

Picking out your niche will help you brainstorm domain names. However, it's the 2020s and most of the best domain names are already taken.

Try to keep your domain name short and memorable.

3. Pick a Hosting Service

If you're unfamiliar with what a hosting service is, it's basically a company that runs servers that host your website for you.

If you want to start your own website that you can monetize and do whatever you want with, you have to sign up with a hosting service.

Web hosting can range in price from less than $3 a month (with Bluehost), all the way up to $50+ a month for one website.

Different hosts have different advantages like different types of bandwidth, varying levels of customer service and support, and more.

We typically recommend that beginners start with Bluehost because they're popular, easy to use, and their customer support is amazing.

4. Set Up Your Website and Theme

Once you sign up for hosting, you will need to install WordPress on your new website and set up a theme.

Depending on who you choose for hosting, you can get help with this part. Many hosts will help you install WordPress, and then setting up your theme is super easy.

A theme is the style of your website. Themes dictate how your website pages and posts look.

There are free themes and paid themes and each theme offers something different.

There are tons of videos on YouTube that will show you how to customize your Astra theme to your liking, too.

5. Sign Up For Pet Affiliate Programs

Signing up for pet affiliate programs will give you the opportunity to start writing about products you can make money from right away.

Some pet affiliate programs will require you to be an established blogger with traffic, but others will accept you even as a beginner.

Here are some pet affiliate programs you can sign up for and start making money from product reviews.

• Amazon Associates Program
• Petco Affiliate Program
• Chewy Affiliate Program
• Pet.com Affiliate Program

6. Write SEO-Friendly Pet Blogging Content

SEO stands for search engine optimization. If you're unfamiliar, it basically means optimizing your blog posts so that they rank high in Google or other search engines.

Content that ranks well in Google and other search engines will attract readers automatically by showing people your blog posts when they search Google about a problem or question they have.

Sure, you can get traffic from social media. But this takes time and effort every single day to grow a following and share all your new posts, not to mention interacting with your followers!

As a new blogger, SEO can take 6 months to a year to really kick in. But once it does, you can sit back and watch the traffic (and the $$$) roll in.

What SEO Content Really Is

If you're brand new to the blogging world, SEO content might feel a little intimidating to wrap your head around. But it's really not hard once you understand it.

What I'm really saying is: writing about what your cat Sassy did this past weekend is not going to get you any website traffic and it's likely not going to make you any money.

What you should be doing is finding out what people are typing into Google and writing articles to answer their questions.

You want to get into the minds of pet owners and learn what they're searching for so you can create articles specifically for them and their questions or problems.

Maybe they're searching for “best cat stroller”. For that query, you could write a post titled “The Best Cat Strollers To Take Your Cat On A Walk”. You can recommend 5-10 cat strollers on Amazon with your affiliate links, and make money when readers buy them.

Then, if you want to talk about your own pets, grow an email list where you send weekly newsletters to your subscribers. This is where you can tell them all about what Sassy did last weekend.

7. Promote Your Pet Blog

Once you have your blog set up and a few great articles listed, it's time to start promoting!

If you've done your SEO well, you will start ranking in Google and getting traffic eventually. But, as I said before, ranking a new website or blog can take 6-12 months.

Google can be finicky and they need a little time to make sure a new website is legitimate and in it for the long haul.

So, while you're waiting for Google to give you that SEO boost, here are some other places to publicize your pet blog.

• Question and answer forums like Quora and Reddit
• Facebook: groups, your own profile, etc.
• TikTok
• Instagram
• Pinterest

How to Leverage Other Blogger's Audiences To Promote Your Pet Blog

Another great way to promote a brand new blog as a beginner is to leverage other people's audiences.

A great way to do this is with a roundup post. A roundup post is a post like:

“Advice From 10 Pet Bloggers/Dog Owners/etc on How to Safely Clip Your Dog's Nails“.

To get other bloggers to contribute to your post, you can join blogging Facebook groups and make a post, or reach out to them directly on their websites.

Offer to give them a link back to their website in exchange for a quote for your post.

Hopefully they will do you the favor of sharing your article since you gave them a shout-out.

They won't always share it, but this is a great way to start getting your blog in front of other people ASAP.

You can also reach out to those same bloggers and ask if they accept guest posts. Guest posting is a great way to promote yourself and your blog by writing a blog post on someone else's website.

How to Monetize Pet Blogs

Although we've touched on monetization a little bit, we haven't talked about how exactly to make money from your pet blogging efforts.

As a beginner, the best ways to monetize your pet blog will be with affiliate marketing and advertising.

And if you already have your own product for sale about pets, selling your own product is a great thing to do too. But if you don't have a product, don't focus on that in the beginning.

Affiliate Marketing for Pet Bloggers

Earlier in this article, we covered a handful of affiliate programs to sign up for as a new pet blogger. Now you just need to learn how to make money from those affiliate programs.

There are tons of products in the pet industry. This year, it was estimated that pet owners in the U.S. were planning to spend close to $110 billion on their pets in one year alone!

These numbers sound impressive, but you might be wondering how they relate to you.

Put simply, people love their pets and they love buying things for them.

All you have to do to make money from the pet industry is find hot-selling pet products, write articles about them, and get those articles in front of passionate pet lovers.

One way to do this is with affiliate marketing. Here's an example.

I just went to Amazon and typed in “Best Selling Dog Products” and this dog water bottle was in the top 2 rows. As you can see, it says “#1 Best Seller” and has 5 stars with over 25,000 ratings.

To make money as an affiliate marketer promoting this dog water bottle, you can write reviews and all kinds of different articles about it. Here are some ideas:

• 10 Best Portable Dog Water Bottles for Hiking With Your Dog
• MalsiPree Leak Proof Portable Dog Water Bottle Review
• Is the MalsiPree Dog Water Bottle As Good As It Seems?
• How to Use the MalsiPree Portable Dog Water Bottle
• Why Every Dog Lover Needs This Dog Water Bottle

As an Amazon affiliate, you can grab your affiliate link for the product in question. Then you place that link throughout your article. When someone buys, you make money. It's as simple as that.

Here are just a few ideas of products you can promote:

• Pet food
• Health products for pets
• Pet insurance
• Dog training
• Pet toys
• Pet product manufacturers

Ad Networks for Beginner Pet Bloggers

Your next option for making money as a beginner blogger is by getting signed up with an ad network. Ad networks place display ads on your website, and you earn a small amount of money every time someone views or clicks on the ads.

Many of the better paying ad networks have minimum traffic requirements to qualify for their networks.

However, there are a few that don't have any traffic requirements at all, like Google AdSense.

3 Successful Pet Blogs for Pet Blogging Inspiration

Here are 3 of the best pet blogs you should check out for your own pet blogging inspiration.

1. Adventure Cats.org: This blog is all about taking outdoor adventures with your cat. Super cool and unique!
2. PetKeen.com: An informative pet blog about all different types of pets, pet food, pet health, and more.
3. TheBark.com: An online magazine style blog all about dogs.

Blog Post Ideas for Pet Blogging

Aside from content to promote affiliate products, here are some ideas for other types of articles to publish on your pet blog.

• Pet travel tips
• Pet advice
• Dog behavior
• Pet businesses
• Dog health
• Dog training
• Handicapped pets
• Real life stories
• Cat training
• Rescue dogs and cats
• Pet enrichment
• Dog food

Final Thoughts on Pet Blogging

Pet blogging can be a fulfilling way to earn a side income or even a full-time income online.

And there are a ton of gigantic pet blogs out there to learn and gain inspiration from when your start a pet blog. Just remember, all pet blogs and bloggers started blogging as a beginner, just like you.

It takes time to build a successful blog and gain more and more traffic. However, with consistency and quality articles, you will get there!