ONLINE BUSINESS IDEA #2 - PET NICHE

If you own a pet, you have a niche. The trick here is to pick a specific type of pet, but make it niche. Don’t create a niche blog about dogs in general, or cats in general. Make it about rat terrier dogs. Make it about sphynx cats. Make it about hedgehogs, iguana’s, or clownfish. Pick something really niche and focus on that. Become the expert on that breed or type of pet, bet the go-to resource for everything about that pet. If you own a pet, what type of pet is it? If it’s a snapping turtle. Great. That is your starting point. A niche blog about pet snapping turtles.

Let's look at dogs in the pet niche as an example.

Pets Niche Example

For sake of example, let’s look at great Danes. Simply because I have two pet great Danes and I’ve already researched this niche. Plus, I’ve created a profitable blog in the dog space.

368,000 people per month are searching online for the term “great Dane”. With that search volume, there has to be an opportunity for a niche somewhere. Looking further, I found the following opportunities:

• Great Dane puppies for sale – 9,900 searches per month with low competition
• Great Dane price – 5,400 searches per month with low competition
• Great Dane adoption – 3,600 searches per month with low competition
• Great Dane names – 1,900 searches per month with low competition

These are just four of the hundreds of keywords that people are searching for relating to the great Dane each month. Using Long Tail Pro (see my review of Long Tail Pro here) each of these keywords has keyword competitiveness under 35, which means there is very little competition for these keywords. You can go in right now and write a couple of quality blogs to begin ranking and driving organic traffic to your blog with these keywords.

Based on these keywords, we can determine that people are searching about how to adopt or buy a great Dane. With this, you could become the go-to expert for people that want to own a great Dane. With this niche in mind, I thought of the following revenue-generating ideas:

• Membership site – create a membership site. The “find a Dane” membership site, you tell your subscribers every time a great Dane is available for adoption in their area.
• Affiliate – pet owners spend a TON of money on their dogs. You can create a couple of resources for new great Dane owners (after you help them find a Great Dane for their home). New dog owners need food, toys, treats, leash, harness, beds, crates, etc… You can use Amazon affiliates to recommend the best products for great Dane’s. Whenever someone clicks these affiliate links and makes a purchase on Amazon, you earn a commission. With my two great Danes, I go through 80lbs of food every four weeks. At $40 to $50 per bag of food, that’s a good commission if you can recommend a big bag of food to great Dane owners.
• Advertisements – Google ads, direct advertisements, and sponsored posts. With one of my blogs, people pay to be featured on my website. I created a new program where I charge other blogs $50 to post an article on my site or $300 to post an article and have the article included in my email series. This price will probably increase because I am getting a lot of people paying for these sponsored posts, so I know I am meeting a need and can charge a higher price. In this case, your customer is other blogs or dog companies (like food and toy companies) that want to post valuable content on your blog to get backlinks to their own website. This is just one way you can make money through advertising on your website. You can also set up a free Google ads account. With this, you can put ads on your website, and you will be paid $0.20 to $1.50 every time someone clicks on the add. I don’t do Google ads anymore, it cluttered my website and distracted my readers, but it was a great way to start earning a little revenue from the website.
• Book – in my dog blog niche site, I wrote a training book. This is an upsell for people after they find their dog. Once they know, like, and trust me because of the valuable content that I provide they buy my training book because they know I am a reliable resource. You can do this with great Dane’s. You could write the book “Everything you need to know before owning a Dane” or “Dane’s 101: The great Dane owner’s manual”.

This is exactly what I did with the Pomsky Owners Association, one of my niche sites. I found that hundreds of thousands of people were searching for information about the Pomsky, but nobody was posting reputable information about the Pomsky breed. There were a lot of scams, puppy mills, and bad information about owning a Pomsky dog. As a dog owner, I hate seeing scams and puppy mills. So I started a website by Pomsky owners for Pomsky owners. Everything I posted to the site was cross-referenced by Pomsky owners, veterinarians, dog rescues, and breeders. I began posting real reputable information that was sourced from people that were experts with the Pomsky breed. With this reputable information, I began shutting down puppy mills and become known as the go-to resource for information about the Pomsky breed. I turned this site into a membership program, sharing available puppies from reputable and ethical rescues and breeders so people could find the perfect Pomsky for their home. I also wrote the book “The Complete Guide to Pomsky Training” that quickly became the best selling Pomsky book ranking #1 on Amazon for the search term “Pomsky”.

As you can see, the pet niche (or dog blog niche) is a great opportunity to find a niche and become an expert on the topic. I did this with the dog niche, you can too.