Teach Pet Care Online: How to Create a Dog Training Online Course

If you love pets, you should consider turning your passion into a business!

How can you do this? By creating and selling online courses.

Both the online course market and the pet care industry have been growing exponentially during the past few years, and are forecasted to keep growing even more.

The Global E-Learning Market is expected to reach $336.98 billion by the year 2026, while the pet care industry has reached its all-time high of $100 million in yearly sales in 2020.

According to the National Pet Owners Survey, almost 70 percent of the US population owns at least one pet and over 63 million families are dog owners. This data makes pet care and dog training a profitable market filled with possibilities.

The latest global pandemic impacted these numbers even more: during the Covid19 pandemic, one in five American households decided to adopt a pet, accounting for around 23 million people.

23 million people - in the United States alone - are now owners of a dog or a cat, and chances are that a lot of them need help with training their new puppy.

So if you are a dog trainer or you simply have a passion for animals, why not create an online course and help others pet owners out?

Do You Need to Own a Pet to Sell Pet Training Online Courses?

Having your own pet or dog can make creating an online pet training course a much easier process. However, even if you don't own a pet right now, if you are knowledgeable and passionate about the topic, this should be enough for you to create a valuable online course.

If you are not a pet owner, try finding a dog that you can spend a lot of time with, maybe from a friend or family member. A lot of people also need help with taking care of their dog and would pay you for walking their dog or watching it while they are away.

This could be a good way for you to earn a little extra money while improving your training skills for your online course at the same time. If you want to include someone else's dog in the content or videos of your online course, make sure to ask for permission first!

How to Create a Pet or Dog Training Online Course

Let's see now what are all the steps you need to take in order to create an awesome online course and what are the best elements to include in a pet training course:

#1: Find Your Online Course Topic

What kind of pet are you going to talk about? Is your online course directed to owners of dogs, cats, hamsters, parrots, snakes?

Additionally, for each pet type, there are many different subtopics: potty training, general care, behavior training, walking, food, breeding, health and so many more...

The first thing you have to decide on is what kind of topic are you going to focus on in your online course. This is an extremely important step that can impact the success of your online course.

Why should you focus on one specific topic? The more you narrow down your focus, the easier it will be to attract customers who are looking for that specific solution. If someone is struggling with potty training their new puppy, they want to purchase an online course specifically designed to help dog owners potty train their pup.

Learn more about this: How to Find the Right Niche and Topic for Your New Online Course

If your course is too generic, you might lose many of your ideal customers. Remember that people purchase online courses because they are looking to solve their problems in a fast and easy way.

So try to focus your online course on a relatively narrow topic and niche. If you are not sure what topic to choose, you can always create another online course later around a different topic.

#2: Structure and Record Your Online Course Content

Once you decide on the niche and topic for your online course, it is good practice to draft an outline of your content first.

Our advice is to take the time to come up with a full structure for your online course: outline how many lessons and modules you are going to have, in which order and the basics of what you should be covering.

Doing this will give you a clearer idea of the steps you need to do in order to complete your online course while sticking to a schedule. Heights Platform makes it really easy for you to layout the structure of an online course, thanks to our Climb Outline feature, where you can add lessons and modules and reorder them by dragging and dropping.

After you have laid out the structure of your learning program, you can start creating each lesson and recording videos.

Video is one of the most efficient content formats for online courses, and it is especially important for teaching pet training courses, as students can visualize your action, understand how your pet reacts and reproduce with their own pooch.

#3. Promote Your Pet Care Online Course

So you have recorded all of your videos and polished your online course. Now what? It is time to launch your program and promote it to the world!

Obviously, your target market is pet owners, so the first thing you should do is find out where your ideal customer is hanging out online. In other words, do your market research and try to understand which places, websites, social media, are the most used by pet owners.

Try to find online communities of pet lovers, maybe some Facebook or Reddit groups and interact with the community by providing value and answering their most common questions.

Think about creating partnerships with other businesses in the industry: owners of eCommerce pet stores, other online course creators who target a different topic. You could even go local: are there any vets, grooming shops or kennels in your area? They might agree to promote your online course to their clients in exchange for a commission or some self-promotion.

For more traditional ways to promote your course online, check out this article from our blog: A Complete Guide on How to Promote Your Online Course and Boost Sales

Conclusion

Do you love pets and are looking for a way to turn your passion into a business? Then online courses are for you.

To create pet care online courses, identify your topic of focus first, then proceed by structuring your online course content, recording video lessons and finally launching and promoting your course.

You cannot build an online course without a dedicated online course platform: Heights Platform is the perfect solution if you are looking for easy-to-use, flexible software to create courses, membership sites, digital products, challenges and much more.