Guests of our petting zoo (Kiev, VDNH) often ask a question — how to create a blog about pets? 

In our Park's experience, the answer depends on what you need a blog for? The obvious answer is to tell and show events from your pet's life on a daily basis. The non-obvious answer is that, based on the experience of your pet, you can draw attention to a more global issue than your pet, for example, to issues of nature conservation, protection of animal rights or, if looking far into the future, to whether it is possible to give civilians to animals rights.

Whatever is your task, a blog is a great way to draw attention to your chosen topic — find like-minded people, raise funds and put your ideas into practice.

How to get started with a pet blog — step-by-step instructions.

1. Come up with a blog strategy.

Before getting into the technical aspects of starting a blog or registering for a social media account, you need to think about your niche and blogging strategy. In other words, you need to answer the question — why do you want to become an influencer? After answering this question, you have to do the following:

• Determine the strategic goal of the blog.
• Choose a blog topic and define its target audience — who are your like-minded people? 
• Choose a blog site — it can be a standalone site, a blog on someone else's site, or a page on a social network.
• Come up with a name for your blog and its social media channels.

2. Set up a blog.

Setting up the technical aspects of a blog is a tricky task. If you do not have the relevant experience, there are already out-of-the-box blogging platforms for your case. The quality standard in this industry is set by the WordPress platform.

If you have chosen a site as a format for your blog, you have to do the following:

• Buy a domain name. The domain name is the address of your blog that people enter into the address bar.
• Buy hosting. This is necessary in order for your site's files to be stored on servers. This will make your blog accessible to users all over the world.
• Register on WordPress, choose a theme and fill out a blog profile — name, username, password. That's it, you're ready to start blogging!

If you need additional features for the site, add the appropriate plugins — they extend the functionality of the site without having to write program codes.

3. Start posting content.

Once you've got your blogging strategy in place and set up, it's time to start creating content for your audience. The key to a blog's popularity is regularly posting high quality content.

4. Promote your blog.

Writing articles for a blog takes a lot of time and hard work. But this is not enough for the blog to become popular. If you want to be read by someone, you need a marketing plan to advertise your blog on social media. The system of promotion on the Internet is built in such a way that without advertising, it is only a miracle that your blog about pets can become popular. 

5. Monetize your blog.

The flip side of spending money is monetizing your blog. Once you start blogging, your focus should be on creating quality content, promoting content, and attracting subscribers. By gaining a certain number of subscribers who spend a certain amount of time on your site in a month, this will attract advertisers to your blog, who will pay you for each transition from your blog to their advertising link. Earned money from advertising, you can invest in promoting your blog. Through content and advertising, you will gradually increase the audience of your blog through which you can tell about your pet, in order to popularize such global ideas as peace, goodness, environmental protection and love for our smaller brothers.

When will your blog become influential?

It depends on two variables — the quality of the content and your ad budget. The optimistic forecast is in a year. Realistic forecast — It will take one to three years. If you want to make money, choose a blog topic that is more popular than your pet. But if you are passionate about your ideas and want to infect the whole world with them through a blog, get ready to work hard — this is that always pays off with interest.