How do you make an extra $1000 per month? Whether you’re becoming a freelancer, starting a side hustle, trying to get out of debt, or it’s just Wednesday, extra money is a truly beautiful thing. There are plenty of legit ways to make $1000 per month that don’t involve taking surveys or other whimsical bullshit like that and one of those ways is by making your cat or dog Instafamous.
How to Make Your Pet into an Influencer
People love animal vids, cats rule the internet, and my bank account has a pretty good argument for taking full advantage of the adorable things pets do. But how do you turn your pet into an Instagram influencer?
Got a pet with a dynamite personality? Instagram isn’t the only place to play. Start by submitting funny videos of your pet to media licensing agencies like the ones below, and upload them to Reddit and YouTube too. Here are a few licensing spots that we’ve tried and liked:
Jukin Media
Best for these media themes: humor, pets, animals, incredible feats, fails
- Easy to upload videos
- Simple user interface
- Mobile friendly
- Great customer service
- 60/40 split in your favor
- As a large distributor, Jukin offers more TV slots than YouTube
Rumble
Best for these media themes: humor, fail, pets and animal
- Quick to get YouTube coverage
- Lots of licensing options
- Their YouTube channel often ranks #1 for pets and animals
- While they can give a higher revenue share for YouTube videos, they also own the rights to it. If you get a very popular vid, you’ll still be sharing the profits with them
- Has a community forum where you can ask questions
Storyful
Best for these media themes: actual news, stories specifically for social media, animals, incredible feats
- Used by top brands
- Large distribution network
- Has a community forum where you can ask questions
- Pays every 3 months
- Long-standing company
- Their monetization rights are per video as opposed to your full YouTube channel
Newsflare
Best for these media themes: sports, science, news, breaking news, science, wild animals
- Based in the UK. In-network with popular go-to for branding agencies, Rightster.
- Concentrate on selling outside of YouTube, mostly in the UK (which gets you bigger payouts due to the exchange rate). They sell to The Guardian, Yahoo UK, the BBC, and the like.
- Easy-to-use platform
- You get a large share of the profits because they only revenue share as
- Your video still belongs to you
And these are just a few of the major ones. Almost any viral video company will also be a licensing company as well. So, when you see Buzz Feed, Break.com, LadBible, etc., they will all have licensing opportunities as well.
Try a few out, see which works best for you, and add as many vids as it takes to start bringing in the dough on the regs. You can use this as part of your $1,000 or, all of it. Remember to check their policies before licensing the same video to two different companies–but definitely license it in as many places as you legally can. Because YOLO.
A Quick-Start Guide to Making Your Pet Instafamous
Making your pet into an influencer goes hand-in-hand with licensed videos, but you can do them separately as well. Keys to making your pet Instagram famous are as follows:
- Decide on what your pet influencer’s personality will be. Look at a couple of good photos you have of your pet and try captioning them before even posting them to your pet’s new Instagram page. This takes the pressure off and gives you a minute to establish a tone of voice for your little rockstar.
- Take clear, crisp photos and keep the coloring consistent by either setting up your own filter settings in Adobe Lightroom, purchasing Adobe Lightroom settings from another pet influencer or on Etsy, or, and this is the simplest way, by using an app like VSCO.
- This is very important: Engage with other users. Look at your competitors and look through their comments to find their most active followers. Choose 10-20 of the followers a week to engage with. Also pick 5 other pet influencers to engage with. Note: there are automated programs and Instagram growth services if you want to pay someone else (or even a bot) to do this for you.
- Repost pics from other pet influencers and your followers on your Instagram Stories.
- Add as many Instagram Stories as you have the time to produce.
- Once you’re in the swing of things, you can start an IGTV station on Instagram to show your followers what your pet influencer has been up to behind the scenes, or even how to do certain things. Think of this part as a literal TV series that you post 1-3 times per week.
- Reach out to a group of 10-15 pet influencers (you will usually get the best response from people under 30k or even 10k) via DM and offer to start an Instagram pod. If you research, you can also find already established Instagram pods, but they can be hard to find.
- Post on your main page twice per day for the best growth.
- Think of daily themes to keep yourself going. Not every day of the week has to have a theme, but sprinkling some in makes it more fun for you and your followers.
- Once you have 5k followers, you’ll start to get requests from licensing agencies and offers from brands. These brands usually aren’t awesome though.
- To get the proper deals, you need to message brands yourself and get onto pet influencer directories online (example). You can even start reaching out as soon as you have anywhere from 1-3k followers. As for licensing agencies, check above for the some of the key players.
- To reach out to brands, you’ll need either screenshots of your audience engagement stats or a pet influencer marketing kit.
- As you grow, you can decide whether joining a larger pet influencer agency is right for you.
- This is by no means an exhaustive list of tactics and strategies you can use for making your pet Instagram famous, but it’s a great place to start.
The most important thing to remember with any of these methods of making your pet into an influencer is to keep going.