Pets are extremely popular and by extension a pet business could become extremely lucrative.

The secret to having a successful pet business is to know what pet owners want, and then supply them with that service.

I have a number of ideas in my head that could possibly all work in regards to the pet industry. The truth is that it would not help me to try to list all the ideas here on this page as some ideas would only work in specific circumstances.

Let me give you an example.

If you were either a Vet or set up a business partnership with your local vet, you could start a dog food business.

Now this business model has to be connected to a vet, because the best quality dog food suppliers very often only supply vets.

So, a dog food supplier like Hills sends the dog food directly to that vet. You get every dog owner in the area to buy dog food from your for cost price.

Cost price?

YES!

You see, if people paid cost price for the two or three bags of quality dog food every month through you, they will save a few hundred rands.

However to get this service, they have to belong to your dog-food-website-club. This is a fee of R80 per month.

For that they get the dog food at cost and the food gets delivered to them for free.

You get to send them emails with special offers, and other money generating things, and they cannot delete your emails because it is part of the club rules.

They will need to place ther orders online at your website and then you deliver at set times during the week.

Now they will be happy, they are getting the best food at cost and delivered for free and this for only R80 a month.

Think about how many dog owners there are in your suburb and if only 30% of them join your club you could easily have a membership of  300 to 400 at R80 each. total turnover R 32000. just from the dog food.

Then you get to sell them a dozen extras and more all the time.

Dog owners very often have other pets and you could easily end up with the same turnover as a successful pet shop, without having their overheads.

What I really specialise in is pet related websites.

Now doing business via a website is what I show people on a daily basis.

I admit that I used to teach them how to do everything from the very beginning, but this tended to really confuse people and now I simply set up their websites for a set fee and make sure that they know what to do to keep the website working properly.

It is this targeted marketing that can only be done so effectively online as people who search for specific items will get sent to the website that has the best information relating to that searched for topic.

That is how the Internet works, and the online marketing consultant that you choose to work with needs to be so up to date that they are aware of what Google did yesterday.

Unfortunately a lot of “website builders” have about a 5% knowledge of online marketing and this is a massive problem to new business owners who come online to get a website built.

What happens is that they are shown very pretty and nice looking websites that have been built by very experienced and professional designers, that are still using last years site building methods.

Be very careful.

wanting to get a great small business idea without risk?

I actually own some well established pet related domains. Want them?

Now one of the biggest reasons I wrote this page was because I own 7 pet related domains (they are .co.za – for the South African market). Now most of the time I am way to busy to even think about these pet websites and it can be months before I remember that I even own them. Now that is a total shame as the website are 2 and a half years old and sit online doing nothing. They are correctly set up and some of them are well placed in the search engines. If someone wanted to have a website based pet store this set of domains would be perfect. Now I would sell them to the right person, so if you are interested then you are welcome to send me an email via this websites contact page.

I would offer you a special deal if you ordered one of my medium marketing packages. This would cost you around R15000 and you would get around R50 000 in total because the established sites get better rankings from the search engines. I.E. 7 two hear old pet sites will get to page one a lot faster.

However sometimes getting brand new domains can be better if you are targeting a specific market.

For example if your website was going to be about dog breeding or dog training then it would pay you to get a new domain and build your business carefully from the beginning.

Well what I would like to say to you before running away is that some basic keyword research will tell you which markets are already strong online in South Africa, and it is possible that if you compared those numbers to one of the more established countries you could find a niche that will clearly grow a lot bigger as the South African market matures and people realise that being online is not just Facebook, twitter and emails.

To get real facts and options discussed I suggest that you set up an appointment with me and we can look at your pet related business ideas.