Your dog isn’t just your best friend, in fact, your dog can be your business partner. Did you know that you can make money with your dog?
Many pet owners don’t know this but it’s actually quite easy to make money with your dog than most think. People love their pets, even those who don’t have a pet love dogs and cats too. Any random picture and video of dogs can go viral. Let’s talk in detail about how we can make money with our dogs.
But before I go on, please do not adopt a dog solely for the purpose of making money. They need love and care. You must not let your desire for profit influence how your dog is treated.
Table of Contents
1. Start a talking dog TikTok account with your dog using buttons
Have you seen videos of dogs pressing buttons and seemingly communicating with their owners on YouTube? The buttons would say a word when it’s pressed. It could be “Water”, “Walk”, “Food”, etc. It looks like this and it’s not too expensive to get from Amazon.
Dog owners would train their dogs to understand what each button means and record their dogs’ attempts at communicating with their humans. It can be entertaining to watch and let us humans get a glimpse into the mind of dogs. Is it surprising to learn that most dogs have food on their mind all the time?
Bunny the dog gained 4 million followers within a couple of months on TikTok. Having a 4 million audience means the dog owner can use it to make money. She can monetize her TikTok account in the following ways:
- Sell homemade dog food recipes (have her dog press buttons on video to see if he likes it)
- Sell merch with the dog’s speech printed on top
- Dropship dog products
- Make money from ads placed on the video
2. Start a talking dog YouTube channel with your dog using texts
Another kind of talking dog video you can create is one that doesn’t involve buttons. You’ll record your dog and place texts on the video to stimulate your dog’s thoughts. It’s not really your dog talking but it can still be entertaining nevertheless.
The picture above, it’s a video of dogs reacting to different foods. Obviously, they choose steak over greens.
3. Make your dog an Instagram star
There are plenty of cute animals on Instagram but the thing that really made certain dogs stand out over others is the human behind them.
Accounts that do well typically have the following in common:
- They have a very active and caring voice
- They’d like and comment on similar accounts
- They’d check in with accounts that haven’t posted anything for some time
- They reply to everyone fast
- They make frequent interesting stories
- They watch your stories and reply to them
- They catch on to trends (if there was a meme trending, they’d make their own version of it)
- Surprisingly, not all of their pictures are well done or look great
- It’s the personality behind the account that propels an account from the back to the front
For me, I don’t really like to stay on Instagram too much too often and I don’t have notifications on and even if I do, I’d hate to check up on what it was about every time something bings on my phone. I think it’s torturous to have to stay glued to your phone to build an audience but if you’re already doing so with your own account, well then, it should be no trouble for you to do so with your dog’s Instagram.
The more active you are, the more likely it is for you to make your dog an Instagram star. And at moments where you become less active, you should see your follower count suffer as well.
Here’s how you can monetize your Instagram account if you have a lot of followers on Instagram:
- Sell merch with your dog’s picture on top
- Sell books that your “dog” wrote (can be funny and silly)
- Draw comics about your life with dogs and sell them as posters
- Sell a comic book of your life with your dog
- Sell homemade dog treats
4. Turn your dog into a meme
No doubt you have seen this dog before. He’s now also the face of many cryptocurrencies. If you can turn your dog into a meme, you can make money in the following ways:
- License picture right
- Hold in-person meet-and-greets
- Sell calendars with memes made with your dog’s face
- Sell plushies that look like your dog
5. Make treats that your dog enjoys that other dogs would too
Dogs don’t like to eat the same thing that humans do. In fact, some human food can be deadly to dogs. This is why when creating dog treats, you can’t use a human as a test subject, you have to use a dog.
You can use your dog as a test subject to create a type of dog treat that dogs would love and then market it on social media.
6. Let your dog paint on the camera
Believe it or not, dogs can paint. You can have your dog paint things on camera and make money:
- Make money from ads
- Sell paintings your dog made
- Sell posters of your dog’s paintings
7. Start a dogsitting service
You can start a dogsitting service using apps like Rover but what many don’t know is that in order to acquire clients, you should show yourself playing with your own dogs in your profile to give your potential customers peace of mind that you know what you are doing.
Dogsitting services like Rover may require you to do a background check to make sure you are not a person with a criminal past that may harm people’s dogs.
Hosting dogs overnight can be quite lucrative.
8. Walk other people’s dogs
One woman in New York City made $200k per year walking dogs for people. During the pandemic, many people stayed home, and thus, there wasn’t as much of a need for dog walkers but now that things are picking up again. Dog walkers are in demand.
If you got a dog, take some pictures of yourself with your dog, and post them on Rover to attract clients who would trust you with their dogs.
9. Record your dog’s growing up journey
People love dogs. You can record your dog’s growing up the journey and throughout the years, as people come to know your dog, it’d be pretty hard for them to stop watching your videos.
You can:
- Sell merch
- Earn money from ads
- Earn money from affiliate deals
- Make money from sponsorship deals
- Design your own dog toys to sell
10. Share cute moments of your dog interacting with your baby
People love dogs and babies. Well, most. There have been a lot of new YouTube channels surrounding this topic of documenting kids and animals growing up together. It can be fun to watch.
You can make money from the ads, sponsorship deals, affiliate deals, or from selling your own merch.
11. Make rescue dog videos
If you don’t have a dog but would love one, why not rescue a dog off the street? Many people like to rescue animals in their spare time. You can use the money you earn to rescue more animals.
You can ask for donations. You should actually use the money to rescue dogs instead of pocketing it, however. But of course, some of that money can be your hourly wage. After all, you’re taking your time out of your day to do the rescue. Just make sure you disclose that to your viewers when you make the videos.
You can say something like that, “Please consider donating to support our rescue. 80% of the money raised goes directly to paying for shelter, medical treatment, food for the rescued dogs”.
12. Make a video for Dodo
Dodo is a channel on YouTube that focus on stories between humans and animals. They have a lot of rescue stories on Dodo and they would pay you money if your video got featured on their channel.
Some people have been suspicious about the authenticity of many of their rescue videos. Many worries that the rescue wasn’t real and was set up to make their rescuers money.
If you are doing this with a pure intention, meaning, you really want to help the animals, it would be no harm to document the interaction you have with animals but if you’re only rescuing animals or endangering animals for money, that wouldn’t be right at all.
Final thought
There are certainly a lot of ways to make money with your dog that many have not thought of before. I hope you learned something useful today. Just a friendly reminder to put your dog first and profit second. Profit should be at the back of your mind and the safety and well-being of your dog should be the utmost priority.
Dogs are intelligent creatures who need love and care. Please be a kind human being to your dog.
