.

I would like to start some type of interactive Pet Coop site where members can negotiate watching each others pets for free. Just swapping dates.


I can also see a section on kennels, dog-walking etc and other paid services.

Any suggestions on how to get it going? or test the market? A lot of people pay for pet boarding, but would they be willing to watch anothers pet in exchange for free services?

Carrie

Hi Carrie,

You say the associated keywords are low, but how low? Have you dug deeper into researching this niche i.e your local and surrounding areas?

What I would do is get something done, this is really important, build the dog/pet content first, upload it to your website and start getting traffic to it, the usual thing, for example Web 2.0 sites like squidoo, hubpages, wetpaint, submit articles, social bookmarking. This is just to get you going, oh yeah you want Incoming Links to your site thats important. so you will need to email other webmasters that are related to your niche.

Then once thats done, this is just a suggestion by the way, what about creating a small report on "interactive Pet Sitting Coop" stating the benefits of this service? that you can give away on your site (and build a list of subscribers at the same time) so obviously autoresponder required.

Now this is just an idea but the point is it would be really easy to do and it would not cost much and also I would write and submit articles on it as well. By doing this at least your know whether there is an Interest or not, but I would do more keyword research before hand.

I hope this has been of help to you.

Regards Mcalpine

If I am using Wordtracker correctly... daily searches are under 40 for pet sitting/ variations. I need to research boarding, kennels etc. Free Pet Sitting, Pet Sitting Swap and Pet Sitting Co-op bring up minimal results - either nothing or under 20.

So, ... is no one interested? or does the prospect just need to be promoted? We have two dogs and it was expensive to have someone watch them while we were on a week vacation. I was happy to have them in someones home rather than in a kennel all week. Being dog lovers, I would have loved the opportunity to swap "dog watching" with another dog lover.

Another question. Since dogs are such a broad niche. Would it be hard to drive traffic to the startup site? Any suggestion for pet niche to start out with? to build up traffic?
The site would only be successful if I can let people know about it. I am thinking local would be a starting point.

It sounds like a neat idea to me. I checked petsitting.com and petsitters.com but they're taken. That said, I like your idea, thought it's probably a lot of work (but the cup is half full, right?) I wouldn't put too much faith in the "traffic prediction" services... Maybe register a domain name, puts some articles on it and get some links, and see how much traffic you get. If it's decent, then you can work on establishing the co-op?

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I found a website which is doing close to what I intended.

I like the idea. One of our main issue when going on vacation is: what do we do with the dog!!!!!

Although I think I might have trust issues leaving her with people I don't really know. And I also might be a bit scared having a 'difficult' dog to keep. Some of them can dig holes, eat furniture, bark a lot, etc... Not sure I'd want to deal with that. You might want to add some rating type thing for people to have an idea if the 'petsitters' are serious, caring, etc.

Just some stuff to think about if you go ahead with it.

Who do you leave your dog with now? Friends?

I agree with you on the rating issue. Possibly a forum for people to get a "feel" for each other. Thank you for bringing this up. I need to look at the negatives, too.

Well, we don't go on holidays often... Being on an island, wherever we go we can be back home quickly! But we do get stuck if we want to go away a whole week-end, let alone travel!!! And furthermore my dog is one of the annoying ones ;-). We do love her a lot but she is still young and looooooves to jump and play and lick and.... after a while you just want to push her away! So, I'm not sure anybody would easily agree to keep her!

Don't have enough experience to help you with the cost/needs of the site you need to build. But I would think that for something like that to work out you would need quite a bit of traffic. So I would start with some content/information type site around your subject in the beginning and then when the traffic is good introduce the swapping part.

I'm slowly talking myself out of this..
People search for boarding in their city.., not broad kennels, petsittinng.



Maybe I'm back to square one with niche idea.

Well really for a web site such as that, it depends on how big your rural area is. Those are your potential customers there. It's not bad to have competition, I think it even helps.