Ways to earn money with your dog

Part 1: What makes money

Work Sucks. and…

Dogs are Expensive.

These two things make a lot of people wish that dogs could somehow pay the bills themselves.

… 

But what if they could?

That is what we asked as well. We have dabbled on many platforms and have accumulated a lot of experience when it comes to business organizing.
This is part 1 of 2, where we talk about earning money with your dog.

In this part, we’ll talk about the different earning methods, which you can incorporate in your future content to earn some money.

Prerequisite: Content is king

First things first, no matter what you do, whether it be Ads, affiliate links or even modelling next to your local pet shop - if you make content that people will like, you are going to earn something.

Before focusing in on a specific platform per say, it’s first important to always focus in on your own strengths and weaknesses.

Focus on learning how to take pictures, how to shoot cool videos, how to edit and how to keep peoples’ focus. Because none of this actually matters, if no one is in your audience.

1. Ads

If you want to do for example a pet related YouTube chanel, or a pet blog, you can put ads in them to earn you money.

But, to do that, you are going to have to use a thing called “an ad provider”.
Google’s one, which they use for YouTube is called AdSense.

For YouTube, once you get 1000 subscribers and 4000 watch hours, then you can sign up for AdSense and enable it on your videos. But for blogs, you can enable ads right off the bat.

AdSense will automatically start showing ads on your content and start earning you money. Here is an ad as well, if your adblock doesn’t block it.

There are actually more ad providers, but AdSense is the most common one people use and talk about.

The good:

• Automatic ads means that you don’t really have to put in effort to try and sell the advertised product. No “Thanks to the sponsor of this video” needed.

• It. just. Works.

The bad:

• AdSense mostly gives you money based on the amount of people who actually click on the ads shown. And for some it works really good, for some it doesn’t earn that much.

• It’s hard to estimate the earnings for anyone - you just kinda have to do it to see how much you earn.

• For YouTube, there is a minimum requirement to enable them

Ads are definitely the easiest to do. Just worry about your own content, get an audience and the money will slowly start coming as well. But it’s also one of the lowest earning possibilities.

I would definitely recommend starting off focusing on this, as you first can just focus in on your pet related content and growing your audience while still passively getting something in return.

2. Affiliate programs

Another great way to earn money is through affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs are simply put just another way of advertising, but this time you need to sign up to ever company separately. Each affiliate program will give you a special code, such as PPS or just a affiliate link.

Affiliate codes almost always give other people a discount and you a percentage of their purchase. You just need to get other people to purchase the item and to use your link or code.

Example: We really like the Tractive GPS tracker. If you want one for yourself, use our (affiliate) link to get one for 30% cheaper.
(You’ll get a discount and we’ll “earn” two months of Tractive service).

The easiest affiliate program to start with would be Amazon. You can sign up to their affiliate program and then literally take ANY product on their website, and get an affiliate link for it. Then, if you make interesting enough content around it and people go to the product from your link, you get money.

You can basically become an unofficial Amazon marketing employee.

The good:

• Affiliate programs typically pay much better than generic ads.

• You can target them much better to your audience and the percentage earned is much higher than with ads.

• Many affiliate programs have a special website that makes signing up easier.

The bad:

• Whenever you have an affiliate link, you need to say that it is an affiliate link, by law.

• Whereas ads can run automatically, with affiliate links, you often need you to create content around them. If people watch your videos for funny dog videos, then putting in links for expensive electronics is not going to bring you in any money.

• You need to sign up to each affiliate program separately.

3. Collaborations

If you are popular enough (content is king), then businesses will often want to collaborate with you, just to reach more people.

Sometimes companies will reach out to you personally to promote things, sometimes you could just write them personally on your platform. If your following is strong, there’s a good chance they’ll talk to you.

They don’t always offer money, sometimes they will just offer you a free item instead. But, money not spent is still more money in your pocket at the end of the day.

The good:

• Businesses will often be very welcoming to giving free things instead of money, because they don’t have an infinite marketing money budget.

• Free. Things!

The bad:

• Depending on who you collaborate with, they might require you to do x posts and y other things.

• This will put you under some work, which results in free stuff, but often no pay.

• Finding partners and signing up is often more nuanced than affiliate programs.

Sometimes businesses just want to get videos of your dog using their product so that they could use it in their content later.

You can get free stuff, but the content you create will be owned by the business for that product.

That is also a type of collaboration where you “model” your dog to the company.

It all comes down to Sell Sell Sell

At the end of the day, what it boils down to is this:

• Do you have an audience?

• What are you trying to sell them?

You can grow your audience by improving your content, like we said before.

And all of the ways we brought out before are just ways you can sell people things. Ads advertise random products, affiliate codes try to sell specific things to your viewers and collaborations sells your efforts to the business.

Once you understand that selling things is everything, you can also think about all other ways of earning money.

Maybe you can even sell something yourself?

• You can sell products made from your dog’s hair.

• You can sell dog related art stuff on Etsy.

• You can even sell an online downloadable guide for how to take pictures of dogs.

• Heh, if your dog has a nice howl, you can even make a song and sell it on Apple music.

The business side of dog ownership is about understanding what people want from you.

Do it well and then try and understand what kind of things you can sell in between the content.

Click here for PART 2, where we talk about some of the different platforms you can use.