How to Start a Pet Sitting Side Hustle in 2024 (Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide for Beginners)

so on my YouTube channel and on my Instagram I've been sharing a lot about pet sitting and so I wanted to make a video because a lot of you have actually been asking me like how I got into it like how does it work how do you get these jobs I've been really loving it so far so I thought I would make a video about it if you are also interested in making money with pet sitting and honestly just like being with these adorable pets oh my gosh so I actually just started pet sitting like two months ago and so far I've done two week-long pet sits this is the second week-long pet sit and then I have two more coming up each of those are three weeks long so it's pretty long and out of these four only one of the pet sits is not paid and that was the first one what is the difference between pet sitting house sitting boarding and dog walking ow this is nothing he licked my eye so pet sitting can mean a lot of things but usually when people say pet sitting it means you live in the person's house so pet sitting is like house sitting but pet sitting means there's pets in the house whereas house sitting means there are no pets and you're just house sitting but house sitting can also mean pet sitting too I don't know if that's confusing boarding on the other hand is when somebody else's pets comes to your house to live and dog walking is pretty simple it's like when you pop into somebody's house and you walk their dogs and then there's also like check-ins if they have cats like you can go check in play with the cat eat the cat Okay so obviously if it's dog pet sitting then it's a lot more work than cat sitting because with dogs you normally have to take them out for walks luckily here with this oh my gosh my bra was showing the entire time anyways luckily with this pet sit with these two adorable dogs and this one cat um the dogs actually don't need walks they just go out into the backyard because it's pretty big and they just poo and pee there and then I just like collect the Poo can anyone start a pet sitting business so I would say yes but there are a couple of things you want to keep in mind obviously you can't be allergic to pets it would be good if you have experience with pets but if you don't that's okay too I have a lot more experience with cats so with dogs what I had to do was just go play with my friend's dogs so I would say dogs are a little bit easier to understand than cats but I think both are pretty easy once you get the hang of things cat is on the bed with me this is the first time and the best way to get experience is if you do have friends with pets like just go over to their house and like play with the pets ask them about feeding schedule walking schedule you can try scooping litter I think anyone can do the actual giving food part scooping litter walking the dog parts not that hard the one thing I am careful of is if I do get a request from somebody and it's like a very very big dog and to have to walk the dog I don't want to be pulled by the dog so I always ask like if it's a big dog like will it chase after squirrels like am I going to be pulled will I be able to control the dog that's why I prefer like small and medium-sized dots actually so for me it works out perfectly because I work from home I run my own business like this content creation business my YouTube channel so I don't have to like report into an office but I do think that with covid a lot more people are working from home so I think a lot more people can actually start a pet sitting business because you're working from home and you don't have to go to an office so you can live wherever you want as long as you have good internet oh and then that's something else I double check with the places I go is like make sure the internet is good and then obviously like if you have your own pets at home or if you have kids and like responsibilities then it makes it a lot more difficult to pets it so I think most pet sitters are either single like you don't have that many response abilities or maybe you're retired how do you get started with pet sitting the most important strategy and the thing that I think has worked the best for me is actually telling all your friends about it telling everybody you know using your own network to get these pet sitting jobs the thing is if somebody's living at your house like you would probably prefer somebody you know right and not a stranger that's why it's been pretty easy to get pets at jobs because a lot of people I know have pets and a lot of people I know know other people who have pets and because they trust me then they're more likely to invite me into their house another thing about going through your network of friends is that when you book a pet sit they are less likely to cancel I've booked some petsits on websites where I don't know the person the other person doesn't know me and a lot of the times they cancel because they say oh I found a friend who can do it instead so for me the best strategy is definitely like going through my friends and telling everybody I know when I'm doing a pet sit like I'll post it on my Instagram and people can see that I'm pet sitting and that's actually how I'm getting a lot more inquiries second way to get pet sitting jobs is to use sites like rover.com so I personally am on Rover there's like a 25 dollar fee and I get requests pretty regularly like I think the website is pretty good like you put in your calendar and everything you put in your rates and people just like send me messages even though I don't have any reviews I just made like a profile writing about some things about me sharing my social media my YouTube channel and yeah it's been pretty good so far by the way this is not sponsored I wish it was sponsored but it's not the one downside I found is that you can only do pet sits that are 100 kilometers from your house so let's say if I wanted to travel to Toronto and do a pet sit I can't do that I live in Vancouver so I would have to put a Toronto address instead but then there's the likelihood of someone canceling so I wouldn't use Rover to like travel and pets it I would definitely go through my network of friends so some other sites you can use are trustedhousesitters.com which I believe there's the fee is pretty large I think it's more than a hundred dollars for the annual fee and you don't get paid so this one is more like a travel exchange kind of thing where you get to go to a new place and there's I think this site is like in so many different places in the world like definitely North America and Europe like a lot of people use trusted house sitters so basically you go to the place it's like you get free accommodation in exchange for you taking care of people's pets and they don't pay you anything same thing for house-sitterscanada.com which I have used I paid around fifty dollars for the annual fee and that's how I got my first pet sit um so it wasn't paid but it was somewhere I really wanted to go to so I did i