Pet Business Ideas (Pet Blog Topics)
In Step One, I break down the “brain dump” process for finding business ideas. I use this to help my clients find pet business ideas. One of the questions in the brain dump is “What pets do (did) you have?”
I LOVE the pet niche. It’s one of the easiest ways to niche down and create a profitable website. Every pet you have ever owned could be your business. Hedgehogs, in particular, is one that I have focused on in the book and in my five niche site ideas series. I have researched the viability and strongly considered building a website about pet hedgehog care after validating the niche opportunity. I could create an entire business about caring for hedgehogs.
I have found the pet niche to be one of the easiest business opportunities. Whatever pet you have, or whatever pet you can think of, can be a niche business.
I did this with the Pomsky dog breed; I built an entire business teaching people how to care for their Pomsky dogs (later sold this website for $95,000). Thomas Strock did this with his website populardoodle.com, where he teaches people how to train and care for Golden Doodles. My Dad is in a similar niche, in the animal niche, he started a business about bluebird predators after I taught him this process. There are a ton of options in the pet niche! Your pet can be your business.
In this blog, I will break down three pet business ideas and show you how to make money. These are pet blog topics that you can take and turn into a business.
Idea #1: Great Danes (the Dog Niche)
I call this the dog niche, but really, it’s any type of pet. I say dogs because I have dogs and love dogs. Plus, this is one of the pet blog topics I’ve chosen. I’ve created a profitable blog in the dog space. This is one of my favorite niche site ideas.
The trick here is to pick a specific breed. 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, iguanas, or clownfish. Pick something really niche and focus on that. Become the expert on that breed or type of pet, and be 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.
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.
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.
How to Make Money
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. Once you grow, you can expand into Amazon FBA to sell your own Great Dane products on Amazon.
- 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 advertisement. I don’t use 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”.
- Print on Demand – the print on demand niche is an easy way to generate revenue selling products without holding inventory. You could sell great Dane themed dog bowls, Great Dane Tshirts, and Great Dane socks. All products that you can customize through print on demand companies like TeeLaunch and Printful.
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” which quickly became the best-selling Pomsky book ranking #1 on Amazon for the search term “Pomsky” (later sold this business for $95,000).
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, it is a great place to find pet blog topics. You can do this too. This is a viable pet business idea.
Idea #2: Parakeets
One pet business idea that jumped out when researching various pet blog topics is the parakeet niche (a pet that my client had in the past). I bet you never would have thought of that pet business idea without reading this blog!
Why is this a viable online business idea?
This is the perfect example of a niche. 110,000 people per month are searching for parakeets. More specifically, thousands of people are searching for specific types of parakeets like monk parakeets, green parakeets, and blue parakeets. More specifically than that, thousands are searching for parakeet care and parakeet training.
That’s the definition of a niche online business opportunity. People buying, training, and caring for parakeets.
Become the go-to expert on parakeets. Learn everything you can about parakeets. And create a website teaching others about parakeets. This is a viable pet business idea.
How will I make money?
Do exactly what I did with my dog blog niche site which is making $2,000 per month and growing fast (later sold this site for $95,000):
- Book – start with a book. Write the complete guide to training parakeets. Thousands of people per month are searching for information on how to train a parakeet. Learn how to train a parakeet, interview professional trainers, read all the resources out there, and aggregate the information into one book that teaches your audience how to train a parakeet.
- Membership – create a monthly paid membership for parakeet owners. Give your members access to a membership portal with all the parakeet information that you have compiled, let the parakeet owners communicate with each other in a private group, and send them a quarterly parakeet gift (treats or whatever parakeets eat). This is exactly what I do with my dog niche website.
- Affiliate – I think I’ve mentioned affiliates for every single online business idea in this blog. Well, here we go again. Add an affiliate aspect to your blog. People are searching for parakeet care tips, so go out there and create a bunch of content on how to care for a parakeet! In this content, include affiliate links to let your readers purchase the cages, food, and care products that you recommend for parakeets.
Idea #3: Hedgehogs
This is one of the pet business ideas I give in my five favorite business ideas breakdown. There is a lot of opportunity here! This is an excellent pet blog topic.
I also break down this niche with an analysis in Step One. In Step One, I give some criteria to identify a viable niche opportunity. To verify the niche potential, I want to see three things:
- Search volume above 10,000 for root niche
- Five subtopics with search volumes above 500
- Ten keywords with KCs of 35 or less and search volumes of at least 100
- Existing products and services
Here is my analysis of the hedgehog niche:
The root niche is “hedgehog”, which has 368,000 searches per month. That is plenty of search volume to carve out a niche. I could get even more specific and look at the root niche of hedgehog as a pet, which has 33,100 searches per month. This topic clearly meets the criterion of more than 10,000 searches for the root niche.
I see at least five clear subtopics in this niche, each with more than 500 monthly searches: hedgehog cage (14,800 searches), what do hedgehogs eat (9,900), hedgehog care (5,400), hedgehog habitat (2,400), and hedgehog bedding (1,300). I also see subtopics about specific types of hedgehogs like albino hedgehogs (3,600), African pygmy hedgehog (5,400), and European hedgehog (3,600). This definitely meets the criterion of five subtopics with at least 500 searches.
For this analysis, I sorted the KC column in Long Tail Pro from lowest to highest to see which keywords Long Tail Pro identified as having the least competition. I found a lot of opportunity here; there were plenty of green and yellow highlights, which means there are a lot of keywords relating to hedgehogs that do not have a lot of competition. A quick look through the Long Tail Pro results showed hedgehog pet for sale (2,900 searches, 18 KC), do hedgehogs like water (170, 15 KC), best cat food for hedgehogs (480, 21 KC), best food for hedgehogs (590, 21 KC), hedgehog bath (1,300, 23 KC), hedgehog food list (390, 23 KC), hedgehog price (3,600, 26 KC), bedding for hedgehogs (1,300, 31 KC), pet hedgehog habitat (210, 31 KC), and hedgehog cage (14,800, 34 KC). This definitely meets the criterion of 10 keywords with KCs of 35 or lower and at least 100 searches.
To check for existing products and services, I searched Google for hedgehog as pet and hedgehog care. These two searches revealed four businesses in the hedgehog care space. They were making money in various ways: ads, affiliate products, custom-built hedgehog habitats, and courses teaching everything you need to know about a pet hedgehog. There are businesses making money in this niche, which meets the criterion of confirming that other businesses are selling products and services in this niche.
My takeaways
After diving deep into Long Tail Pro, I could clearly see a niche business opportunity. The research revealed plenty of search volume (a large enough market) and an ample number of subtopics (e.g., hedgehog food and hedgehog bedding) that could be subsets of my business and revenue drivers. The hedgehog business idea meets all my criteria, validating that this is a viable niche opportunity. This is a viable pet business idea.
Conclusion: Pet Business Ideas
As you can see, the pet niche is FULL of viable niche website opportunities. These are just three examples of pet blog topics. There are plenty more pet business ideas out there waiting for you. Look back on the pets that you have owned. Could your pet be the topic of your online business?
Ready to Start Your Business?
If you find yourself saying “I want to start a business, but I don’t know what to do,” this is the book for you.
In Step One you will come up with over one hundred and fifty business ideas, you will conduct market research to narrow your list of ideas down to one viable idea, and you will validate the idea so you can hit the ground running and launch your business.
Ready to start your business? Pick up your copy of Step One today, and get started building your business.
