A pet blog focuses on stories relating to pets, often cats or dogs. Pet blogging is an excellent way to share a love of animals, and it’s also a great way to make money through affiliate marketing, sponsorships, and advertising. What makes a great blog about pets? Some success comes with showcasing an adorable pet.
Much more success, however, comes from keeping up with the latest trends in pet ownership and sharing those details with readers. Crafting a well-written blog with high-quality images and videos helps, too, especially as videos and pictures lend themselves well to sharing on multiple platforms.
Let’s learn more about starting your own pet blog with some best practices and real-world examples of excellent pet blogs.
Benefits of Pet Blog Sites
If you love pets and constantly take pictures of your pet, what better way to make that love even more rewarding than by creating a pet blog? Blogging is a creative endeavor but also a practice that can help you learn more about your pet while sharing what you’ve learned with your readers. Overall, pet blogging can become an incredibly rewarding part of the pet ownership experience.
Pet blogging is an ideal way to turn your love of pets into a viable business where you might also connect with other bloggers, pet parents, and industries related to pet welfare and care. Your pet blog may reach people worldwide, which is particularly rewarding when you can impart valuable information to others just starting as pet owners.
How Do You Start a Pet Blog?
To start your own pet blog, you only need to choose the platform for your blog and buy a domain name. Many companies offer free website creation tools when you buy a domain name through the company. Other hosting companies offer free websites in exchange for allowing the company’s advertising to appear on the blog.
However, choosing a blog hosting company and thinking up a cool domain name will only get you to the starting line. Another important step is choosing a focus or topic for your blog. Your decision on your blog topic will influence how you create your content, whether it’s with videos, pictures, creative text, or any combination of those elements.
Here are the basic steps you’ll follow when you start a pet blog.
1. Choose a Blog Name
A memorable name helps make sure your blog name imprints itself in the minds of your readers, but your blog name mustn’t be too long or difficult to remember. You should choose a short title and domain name that don’t require the average reader to break out a dictionary for spelling and meaning.
When you think of your name, you’ll need to figure out whether that domain name is available or taken. You may need to modify a word if your preferred title isn’t available as a domain name. You can also explore different extensions like .org if the .com version of your domain name is already taken.
You can register your domain name with a domain registrar like GoDaddy. You could also research expired domains and pick up a domain name that already has SEO value.
2. Choose a Blog Hosting Service
You’ll find that virtually every company that sells web hosting plans has a free version or a trial period where you don’t need to pay for the service. You’ll want to check out the different plans offered by each website hosting service to determine the cost of running your blog.
Look at the amount of bandwidth each plan allows. Bandwidth measures how much data a site consumes from visitors downloading the content. Every time a person visits your website, they download images, text, videos, and other elements to their device, and those downloads are measured in bandwidth.
Your chosen hosting service should enough bandwidth for your blog. If you host videos on your blog, you’ll need a higher bandwidth allotment than if you just post still photos. Personally, I suggest avoiding the shared server plans like the ones offered at GoDaddy or Bluehost.
I use Flywheel for web hosting.
3. Choose a Topic or Angle for Your Blog
If you’re thinking about setting up a pet blog, you probably already know what type of pet you want to feature and a few topics you’d like to cover. However, it’s helpful to narrow your focus somewhat to take advantage of a popular niche.
For example, do you have a three-legged dog? Rather than creating a blog that’s just about dogs, consider focusing on special needs pets. Maybe you have a particularly old cat that’s been with the family for years. You might focus your blog on owning a senior cat or on the benefits of senior cat adoption.
From time to time, you can throw in other topics that aren’t specifically related to your blog to build an audience based on your niche and the overall pet blogging industry. Perhaps your blog focuses on owning Old English bulldogs, but you routinely discuss topics impacting all pet owners, like nutrition, exercise, and play.
4. Select Your Preferred Method of Communication
Do you enjoy talking to the camera more than writing your words down? Your blog doesn’t need to focus solely on the written word. You can craft an engaging blog with videos and photographs, as long as you don’t entirely neglect writing at least 600 words for each blog post.
Sometimes, making a simple transcript of your video is all you need to do to make sure your blog shows up on search engine results.
If you decide to focus on videos, you’ll need to invest some time and money into the equipment you’ll use for filming. Some bloggers use their cell phones for videos or built-in webcams on their computers.
While these options are fine initially, upgrading the camera and sound system at some point may become necessary to grow your audience.
Readers, listeners, and viewers respond very positively to beautiful and professionally crafted videos, and nice equipment doesn’t need to cost thousands of dollars. If you start making money from your blog, one of the first investments you might want to make is in the quality of your filming and photography equipment.
5. Design Your Visual Look
We’ve all seen websites from the late 1990s published before any of the cool tools and features we take for granted today were in use. Gaudy backgrounds, garish colors, and unreadable fonts filled many of those websites, and designers eventually realized that no one wanted to visit ugly websites.
Even though the focus of your pet blog isn’t how your website looks, the design of it still has a dramatic impact on repeat viewership. A blog style that’s easy to read, uncluttered, and focused will always offer a more pleasant reading and viewing experience than a website filled with too much digital stuff.
Try to avoid using multiple different fonts on the same page.
Stick to a neutral template that focuses on black and white with just one or two other colors added into the mix for emphasis for items like titles, links, logos, and buttons. Build a clean and professional website, and your readers will respect you as a quality content provider.
Check out this blog featuring the best themes for pet blogs.
6. Create Excellent Content
The hardest part of starting your pet blogging career isn’t selecting the domain name, thinking up the topic, or buying the equipment. The hardest part is creating great content viewers want to consume as often as you publish.
Readers and viewers today consume an incredible amount of content each day. They want more content as quickly as you can publish it.
However, you can’t expect to build a following of pet fans if you don’t spend time creating good content. If you’re not a particularly adept writer, you might want to hire someone to edit and refine what you’ve written.
Over time, you can build your personal writing skills and rely more on your own writing rather than the writing of someone you hire.
7. Promote, Promote, Promote
No one will read your blog if they don’t know it exists, and the best way to make sure people know about it is to promote it on every social media platform you can find. Optimizing your blog for best SEO practices helps get results on Google, but search engine results are just part of the overall picture of blog promotion.
In addition to creating a blog that pays attention to search engine optimization, you’ll also need to look at creating accounts with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest
Even if your main focus isn’t videos, you may still find it helpful to post tidbits about your blogs on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Even Facebook has gotten into the video game with a tab on the app dedicated to video content.
Note that you don’t need to create wholly unique content for each platform. You can create original content on your website and then feed a little bit of that blog to another platform.
For example, you might post a snippet about your blog on Facebook and include a link for readers to click that will take them to your website. You can let your Twitter followers know you have a new blog or video up with a brief tweet.
8. Start Making Money with Your Blog
If you publish quality content and truly enjoy sharing information about your pet or pet ownership with your readers, why not get paid for your time and effort? The endgame for most bloggers is making money with the blog, which means taking specific steps to monetize the blog.
At the start, you might not make more than a few pennies with each blog post, but sustained efforts in advertising, promoting products, and employing affiliate links may help you earn some nice passive income from your old posts.
You may find, especially with videos, that new viewers to your site will crawl through all of your old content. You’ll get paid whenever those viewers watch your videos on YouTube or click your affiliate links when reading your posts on your website.
As long as you create new content regularly, your old content always has a chance of being seen, even years after you originally published it.
Pet Blogging Topic Ideas
Popular topics for pet blogs run the gamut from the weird to the wonderful. Pet bloggers talk about everything from rare pets to common problems and their solutions, and each topic has a potential audience. Do you own a guinea pig? Other people do, too, and they probably want to know whether a guinea pig is safe to wander around the home or if you should always cage the pig.
Do you own a rescue mutt from your local shelter? There are probably readers out there who would love to know how to introduce a new rescue dog to the home when you already have a pet. What’s the best way to introduce a new cat to a house with a pet dog? What’s the best food for a purebred poodle puppy? The topics are endless.
You might find it helpful to build a blog on a niche topic – perhaps Siamese cat ownership – while sprinkling in general blogs about all cats every so often. For every blog post called “are Siamese cats nice,” you can follow up with a general blog post like, “are cats friendlier than dogs” or “can you introduce a kitten to a house with old cats?”
Here are a few niche areas to consider for a blog about pets.
- Rare dog breeds
- Pet supply reviews
- Special needs pets
- DIY pet products
- Real-life pet stories
After you’ve chosen your main topic or focus, consider writing out a list of blog topics you’d like to cover over the next few months. You may find it helpful to think about a topic for a few days or weeks before writing about it. The idea will sit in your mind for a little while, and you may find it easier to write. You may also find it helpful to write down a series of related blog posts that you can publish over the course of a few months.
The Most Popular Pet Blogs Today
1. Adopt a Pet
Adopt a Pet is a non-profit organization helping rescue pets get new homes. However, the website isn’t just a place to adopt new pets. It also features blog posts with helpful information for pet owners on nutrition, health, training, and safety.
Adopt a Pet is an excellent way to find a rescue pup or cat to add to the family and all the information you need to keep your pets happy and safe. Visitors can learn valuable information about their pets and a place to search when it’s time to add a new pet to the family.
2. Pango Pets
Pango Pets focuses on dog and cat care, but they also throw in articles about pets like rabbits and small mammals. They have a helpful feature on their website called “Ask the Vet,” which allows readers to get answers to their questions by emailing the website and including a few pictures of their pet.
Veterinarians on topics like “Why write blogs is My Dog Drinking a Lot of Water and Drooling” and “Why Are My Cats Fighting All of A Sudden?” Visitors think Pet Life Today is one of the best pet blogs because veterinarians write the blogs.
3. Champion of My Heart
Champion of My Heart is an award-winning dog blog written by Roxanne Hawn. The blog was first published in 2007 and features various topics about dog care, like product reviews, information on veterinary hospitals, pet health, and dog training.
Over the years, Hawn has posted at length about her experiences with dog ownership and has even written a book about dealing with pet loss. The website encourages return visits because the writer shares information about her personal pets, which helps build a bond with readers who want to continue learning about her dogs.
4. PetKeen
Pet Keen is a blog for all sorts of pets, from guinea pigs and birds to fish and cats. Recent blog posts include “How Long Does It Take Cats to Digest Food?”, “How Much Exercise Does My Labrador Need?” and “Can Dogs Recover from Poisoning?”
The blog is an excellent place to visit if you have a non-traditional pet (something other than a cat or dog). The wide variety of topics on Pet Keen ensures the website receives high traffic because there are topics for all types of readers.
5. Dogalize
Dogalize is an informational blog that offers advice for dog and cat owners. The topics on the website range from general pet care to profiles of famous people who own pets. Some interesting topics covered on the blog include cat anorexia, dog walking, feline immune systems, and pet-safe lawn care.
Some of the best pet blogs have videos, and others are filled with pictures. The variety of media used on the website is valuable because it gives visitors something different to see and read each time they visit.
6. Walkin’ Pets
Popular blog topics on the website include dog wheelchairs, finding a pet sitter for a disabled pet, and health problems common for certain breeds.” class=”wp-image-39534″/>Walkin’ Pets is an amazing website that features stories about special needs pets and valuable information for owners of pets who use wheelchairs or need extra help in their day-to-day lives. Popular blog topics on the website include dog wheelchairs, finding a pet sitter for a disabled pet, and health problems common for certain breeds.
The website is helpful even if you don’t own a special-need pet. The website does cover a narrow niche in pet ownership, but the information it provides is useful and beneficial for any pet owner. The website’s information helps create compassionate and knowledgeable pet owners.
7. Go Pet Friendly
Go Pet Friendly is an excellent example of a blog that takes a look at a specific and focused part of pet ownership. In the case of Go Pet Friendly, that topic is pet travel tips. Not only can readers find some great places to travel with pets, but the website’s blog features all sorts of articles that make traveling with a pet easier.
Pet travel tips include pet-friendly campgrounds, cat harnesses, and pet first aid. Traveling with a pet is a big step for some pet owners, and Go Pet Friendly is a helpful and popular website because it covers topics that aren’t always a part of general pet ownership websites. Go Pet Friendly knows its niche and offers valuable information about traveling with pets.
8. I Can Has Cheezburger?
I Can Has Cheezburger is a huge site with years of posts about pets doing silly and strange things. The site is part of a larger conglomerate of websites on topics like memes, internet fails, and geek culture. Many of the most popular blogs feature funny pictures of cats, and the website initially became famous years ago for its huge repository of funny pet pictures.
Part of the success of I Can Has Cheezburger is that it offers so much content whether someone is a cat lover or dog lover. The website operated for several years as one of the internet’s most popular pet blogs for comedic pictures and videos, and its huge library of old posts means visitors can stay on the site for hours looking at the content they’ve never seen.
9. Wag the Dog
Wag the Dog is a website that posts articles about pet products, pet food, care advice, travel ideas, and other topics related to living with and caring for dogs. Recent topics include recommended flea treatments for cats and dogs, training dogs, memorializing pets that have passed on, and warning signs that indicate you might need to take your pet to the vet.
Wag the Dog is a great example of a general advice blog for dog owners that covers many valuable topics. The website was founded in 2012 and has published many posts about dogs, pet food, and general dog care.
One of the most popular parts of the website is the section regarding traveling with pets, which features helpful travel guides for places like Switzerland, Hong Kong, and France.
10. Furrtographer
The Furrtographer is a pet blog devoted to pictures of pets and features photographs of famous pets like Lil’ Bub, Grumpy Cat, and Jarvis P. Weasley. The owner of the site is a photographer named Josh, who has taken pictures of dogs and cats. He won several “best of” awards for photographers in San Francisco and regularly posts pictures and stories about new pet photoshoots.
Best Practices for Pet Blogging
Publish Frequently.
The most important way to secure repeat visitors and build a large audience is to publish regularly. You may find it helpful to stick to particular publishing date so your readers have something to look forward to each week. Consider something less frequent if you don’t feel confident that you can meet a demanding publishing schedule.
Although you may find it extremely beneficial to publish your pet blog every few days, don’t risk missing your deadlines because you set a too aggressive goal. Try publishing once a month and increase the frequency over time as your blog becomes more successful and earns you money.
Remain Focused.
When you choose a niche or specialization for your pet blog and build a following, it’s important to stick to that niche and always build upon it. If you create a pet blog about living with dalmatians and build a following of dalmatian lovers, you might think twice about changing your focus to golden retrievers or a completely different subject.
Feel free to branch out occasionally, but don’t alienate the audience you’ve built over several months or years. Find something that works and create content around it.
Don’t Forget SEO.
Search engine optimization is an umbrella phrase that covers so many facets of building a successful pet blog. When writing posts about bulldogs, don’t forget to include tags like #bulldog, #bulldogcare, and #petbulldogs, especially if you start a pet blog and publish on Instagram.
You’ll also want to consider other important SEO practices, including meta descriptions, writing short blog titles, and pictures or videos with your pet blog posts. These practices are important for reaching your target audience and getting to the coveted top spot on the search engine page.
Promote Even If It Costs Money.
No one will read your pet blog if they don’t know it exists, which means promoting it is an essential part of writing a great pet blog. Promotion is often free and accomplished with brief posts on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Sometimes, you may find it helpful to pay for advertising, especially if your pet blog makes money. Consider putting some of the profits of your pet blog back into promotion, which can boost your readership and help you boost your earnings even more.
Automate and Amplify Your Content
Missinglettr is an amazing, automated social media marketing solution that will help you create strategic campaigns that drive traffic for an entire year! Not only will your posts be scheduled and published on time, but they’ll also be perfectly formatted and look great. Missinglettr is the easy way to take your social media marketing to the next level.
Write & Create Great Content.
The most important part of creating an excellent pet blog is providing great content. Poorly written blogs, sloppy videos, and forgettable stock photographs won’t help you build relationships with readers or make money through product partnerships, affiliate links, or views.
A pet blog is only as good as its content, even if it was designed by a professional. A beautiful site with nothing interesting to say or see won’t become popular with readers. However, a modest yet well-designed website can swiftly attract readers and viewers.
Form Relationships.
The internet is an incredible tool for communication and makes it so much easier to get in touch with virtually anyone on the planet. Readers enjoy communicating with the owners of the websites they visit, so it’s important to build relationships with readers.
In addition to communicating with readers, it’s also helpful to communicate with companies with which you might develop partnerships for sales, posts, videos, and other content.
Tips for Delivering Great Pet Blogging Content.
The most important component of successful pet blogging is delivering great content. Great writing skills, knowledge of video blogs (vlogging), and attention to detail help, but those skills will only get you so far. It’s essential to add personal content that helps you make a connection with your readers.
Do you own a pet? Make your pet part of your online persona. Take pictures that feature your pet and talk about your pet in your videos or write about your pet in your blog posts. You’ll build readership as readers and viewers begin to connect personally with your pet. Your readers will love keeping up with whatever your pet is doing.
Even if your blog isn’t specifically focused on your pet, you can still take pictures and use personal media of your pet in each post. For example, if you’re writing an article about introducing a cat into a dog household but don’t own a cat, consider photographing your dog sitting next to a cat tree.
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In a visual world, Canva Pro makes it easy for anyone to achieve their goals and create professional designs with premium content and features like Brand Kit, Background Remover, and more.
Your readers will connect the dots, and you’ll engage your repeat readers by including some information about the internet canine they’ve come to know and love through your blog posts.
Take the famous internet cat Lil’ Bub, whose owner built an incredible website and social media presence surrounding her unique appearance and status as a special needs pet.
Readers connected with Lil’ Bub and her owner because he shared personal stories about Bub while also discussing the importance of supporting special needs and handicapped pets. Although Lil’ Bub has passed on, her legacy represents an incredible boost to awareness and representation regarding special needs pets.
Focusing on the quality of your content will always win you more views and readers than posting generic, poorly rewritten blogs with no original content. Balance your blog posts with interesting information, personal content and images, and valuable niche topics.
Pet Blogging FAQ
How much do pet bloggers make?
Some bloggers make thousands of dollars a month with their pet blogs. The amount of money you make depends entirely on the effort you put into the process. Bloggers who expand their empire to cover videos on YouTube, pithy posts on Twitter, and content-rich posts on their websites will always make the most money.
How do I become a pet blogger?
The first step to becoming a pet blogger is thinking of a topic that interests and engages readers. Once you have a niche, angle, or overall topic, you’ll need to select a domain name, find a place to publish your blog, and start writing. You’re an official pet blogger as soon as you publish your first piece.
What is a Pet Blog
A pet blog offers information about pets. Some pet blogs tell real-life stories about amazing pets. Other blogs feature practical information about pet ownership or pet health. At their core, pet blogs are about pets, whether about popular pets like cats and dogs or unusual pets like lizards and snakes.
Are dog blogs profitable?
Pet blogs represent an excellent way to make money with blogging, but it’s necessary to put the time and effort into good content to reach a state of profitability. If you put very little work into blogging, you’ll probably get low monetary rewards from the experience.
Become a Pet Blogger and Have Fun
Pet blogging represents a topic that offers the potential for fun, fame, and fortune. Cover a topic dear to you, build a fanbase that loves your pets, and make some money along the way. Few things are more entertaining and rewarding than making money with a blog about pets.
