Would you believe that some pet sitters and dog walking entrepreneurs may shy away from starting and continuing a blog because they are afraid of running out of topics to blog about? Have no fear as I am about to share a simple formula which will provide you endless ideas for blogging topics!
Start with analyzing what you do and what services you provide.
Let’s start by analyzing what you do as a pet sitting or dog walking company. You provide pet care services to people, you sell the love and fuzzy stuff which is pretty easy to sell because you are dealing the hearts of your clients. This alone – with focus on writing about “why” your services are fabulous is a topic that you can take many different venues with.
But let’s start with listing the services you provide:
- Dog Walking – 15 min, 30 min, 1 hour walks
- Pet Sitting
- Quick Visits
- Overnights
- Night Visits
- Vacation Visits
- Dog Running
- Doggy Daycare
- Boarding
- Group Dog Services
- Training
- Other
Take each one of your services that you offer then answer the following questions:
- Why do I offer this service?
- Why would someone want to purchase this service?
- What are the benefits of the service?
- How does the pet benefit? health, happy, training, energy, weight loss, recovery, recuperation, etc.
- How does the client benefit? freedom, guilt free, time, energy, satisfaction, etc.
- How popular is this service? Why is it popular?
- What are the frequent testimonials related to this service?
As you read each of these questions and apply them to each of your services, I bet many things come to mind and with each of the answers you provide, chances are you are able to elaborate them. These are GREAT and extremely important things to blog about! You will be able to provide yourself with an endless list of topics to blog about when it comes to your pet sitting and dog walking services and business which will help to provide you with those fantastic benefits I talked about in my last article 6 Reasons For Pet Sitters and Dog Walkers To Start A Blog!
What topics do you blog about?
We all know that the act of “blogging” is super good for business over all right? Let’s take a moment and relate these benefits specifically pet business owners. Here are 6 reasons why pet sitters and dog walkers should be blogging.
1) Content is King
Keep your content fresh and growing. I’ve said this a few times and will say it again in many posts to come, that us pet business owners tend to be happy with a completed static website without many changes – perhaps pictures of pets? What you need to consider doing is to try to accomplish ways to increase the related content and create a kingdom of pet knowledge with your website.
2) Search Engine Optimization.
Oh ya baby!. SEO is a biggy. Whether you turn your website into a full CMS website or just create a blog – the SEO will increase with a fantastic open source system like WordPress which is super rich in helping with this task right out of the box. But it’s a combination of all the right things that will help with your SEO over all. Blogging is a way of increasing content and creating a following to further increase popularity.
3) Building Your Brand
Neato!. Yes, brand building is important right? We want to use blogging as a way of increasing our brand awareness to those who may be interested in our services or products. The more we blog, the more visitors, the more visitors the more brand building. Get your blog out there!
4) Building Expertise
You are an entrepreneur! Not just a business owner! Entrepreneur’s are sensed as people with a good amount of knowledge about their pet business and the business of the pet business operations. By using our pet blog to talk about your pet related knowledge and offer your readers tips, stories, information etc – you are positioning yourself as an “expert”. This creates reliability and trust – which is extremely important to your pet business!
5) Networking – Building Your Business
Absolutely! – blogging is a social activity and considered a part of the “social” trend with internet marketing. By blogging you are being interactive, you are sending an invitation to comment, you are inviting curiousity and from your blogging efforts you may attract other “partners” or like minded pet businesses who may wish do business with you and refer back and forth. This is building your pet business!
6) New Clients – New Potential
The end result – not the only one – and not necessarily always the most important - is to secure new clients for your pet business. Blogging can bring you new clients!
Do you blog? If you do, let’s have a look ! I would love to see your blog and let’s exchange links!
I have to admit, I just love spending time on my website daily to see what else can be done to increase it’s website rating. This morning I worked on a plan for to increase more pages for search engines to “index”. So what do we mean by “index” and how is this a WordPress benefit?
First, the more pages that contain relevant information to your pet website ( not repetitive ) the better. Google’s web crawler visits your pet business website periodically to look for new content. The more frequently you have new content that is again, relevant to your website the more pages your website will have within Google’s cache. Hint: Avoid duplication! Google often penalizes for duplication of content / frequent of use.
So how SEO/Indexing a benefit using WordPress as a pet website benefit?
The pure manufacture of WordPress!. YOU, as the owner of a WordPress Pet Business website can easily create pages and content at a push of a button!. It’s easy to do something every day – a post, a blog post, add new content to your pet website!. Unless you know how to manage your current non CMS website on your own, it’s not always as easy to do this and it would be time consuming too. With WordPress as your CMS pet website, you are in for a super, wonderful, joyful and easy experience to maintain, manage and create new content daily!
You might be wondering what the advantages must be having your pet business website turned into a complete content management system aka CMS? The benefits are just too large to ignore and let me share them with you!
First, turning pet business websites into a CMS is pretty new. The whole concept of having a CMS dynamic website in the pet business niche hasn’t been talked about much, advertised much, nor have I seen many of them out there through my experience as both a pet sitting business and a web designer. I have taken this past year ( as I was planning and building PetBiz Branding ) to research just how many pet business websites are taking advantage of this incredible ability that a feature rich CMS has to offer and not surprisingly – I didn’t find any. Seriously. I didn’t find any pet business websites ( in the pet sitting and dog walking niches ). Most if not all are static sites. Not that this bad – it’s just that I must share the incredible features and abilities that are being missed out on.
What is a Content Management System?A Content Management System is a dynamic website ( opposite of static ) and was initially built and designed to host a great number features and abilities that bring a community together and all the members of that community or web to share in building of the communities growth through sharing in content submission. A CMS is also used provide static pages of content while allowing other pages to become dynamic and forever changing. Well known CMS’s are JOOMLA and DRUPAL. But let’s take a good look at WordPress. WordPress is well known as a blog system but what people don’t realize is it is a content management system and it behaves like one. WordPress offers incredible , unsurpassed, super efficient CMS abilities for pet business and their websites.
So just what are the advantages for pet business websites?
- Ability to turn your static website into a full functioning dynamic CMS.
- Ability for the owner of the website to freely add pages and posts.
- Ability to incorporate your website pages WITH a blog so that your whole pet business website is one in one which drastically increases your content / indexing of pages / SEO. ( if done properly )
- Ability to change most aspects of the content for the owner decreasing web maintenance costs.
- More control over your own website
- Ability to branch your website out and expand it’s content through growth.
- Ability to allow interactive areas for your clients or potential clients to become interactive with your site.
- Ability to attract more “come backs” by potential clients and current clients because of increasing content / blog etc.
You cannot do these things with a static website without A) Additional growing costs for your pet web designer to implement for you. B) Time – whether it be your time to do it yourself on your site builder or by your pet web designer.
First let’s define “Static”. There are really 2 meanings when it comes to talking “Static” websites. Typically a static pet web site is one that is maintained by some one other then the owner of the web site. With a static web site it is typically created with HTML and often needs to be edited by the creator of the web site if the owner is not very knowledgeable in editing HTML. Another definition for “static” is a web site that stays the same – in other words “still”. Every time the page loads of a pet web site – the page is the same and it never changes. Let’s look at some advantages and disadvantages of a static web site.
Advantages
- The first advantage of a static web site is that it can be easily indexed given all the proper SEO has been performed and the site in itself is compliant and easily read by search engines. Once indexed the content would stay the same – so long as the web site is static.
- It is much cheaper to have a static website made initially - as fewer pages are required to implement and there is no need for coding of a management system (CMS).
- Once built you can leave it alone – *if* the owners desires to do so. If the owner decides he or she does not want to update the site it can be a very cheap way to have your business presence on the web without added expense ( but often there is a price for this later! )
Disadvantages
- Costly in the long run – if you use your static website to it’s fullest by changing content, or trying to add more content and pages and you are good at requesting up keep and compliance. There is a cost each time you need your pet web site designer to make those changes for you. The cost can be much higher in the long run.
- Risk of loss of the designer who built the website for you should they stop their services. What do you do if you require updates?
- SEO – can be affected long term as far as updating of pages and increasing your exposure because of changing content, adding content etc. Those with Dynamic web sites index more content on search engines assuming they are adding fresh content.
Most often pet businesses have static web sites where the designer must do most of the changes for the client. Many pet business owners have no idea that they can indeed have a dynamic website with many more features and options to cut costs and give them more options for future growth, increase their potential clients interest while visiting their website while increasing SEO.
What type of website do you have? Static or Dynamic?