Today’s guest blogger is Stacie Tamaki, Dogster member extraordinaire and guardian of famous pooch Kitai.

You’ve found Dogster.com. You’ve posted pictures and filled in your pet’s bio, and you check back for cool contests and promotions. You feed, walk, play with, groom, pet and adore your four-legged furry buddy. If you frequent the Dogster Forums, you even pretend you are your dog: posting away under their alias and making friends with other humans who will forever be known to you first as their dog’s name. BOL’ing instead of LOL’ing, I still laugh when people call me Kitai instead of Stacie in a private email or better yet on the phone.

But did you remember to build your dog its own personal blog? Using sites like Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress, you can create a blog for little or no cost and start spreading the word that a dog’s life just keeps getting better and better.

You may ask yourself, does your dog really need a blog? Hopefully it does. Hopefully your dog has a lot to say about the great way you care for him or her. I’ve found that having a blog, or in Kitai’s case a blog and entire website, is a great educational resource for other pet owners.

1. By including photos of your pet out on a walk, at the dog park, at a play date with another dog or hanging out at an outdoor cafe, if your city has them, your blog can show owners who normally don’t take their dogs outside of their homes or yards that they can do more with their pets than they realize. Kitai recently attended his first black-tie gala! And of course his trip to NYC last fall to be on tv was a huge and exciting adventure for both of us.

2. You can add a link list to help those interested in adopting a dog from a local shelter or rescue group. The clickable links make it easy for people to go and view dogs looking for homes in their local area and will introduce them to organizations they didn’t even know existed. If you know responsible, ethical breeders, you can include a preferred breeders list as well to steer people away from backyard breeders and pet shop puppies that support the puppy mill industry.

3. They’re a great way to help spread the word on the latest and greatest news in pet care. Grain-free food? A cool new reflective leash for night walking? An upcoming pet-friendly event? Help with behavior problems? You can post it all on your blog and help bring informative content to pet owners who don’t know about all of the products, services and events available to them to help care for and have more fun with their pets.

And if you build your pooch its own blog or website, don’t forget to order some inexpensive business cards online so you can pass them out to strangers who stop you on the street to chat about your pup. Recently I gave away all 250 of Kitai’s business cards, so I just ordered another 500.

Another great option if you want to use your Dogster Diary as your blog but have a fun domain name (url) to put on a business card? Go to a domain name registrar like GoDaddy and register a url like: www.FidoAndFifi.com. It costs about $8 per year to do this. Then forward the url to your Dogster page. Print www.FidoAndFifi.com on your business card, and when people go online and enter the url, it will take them straight to your Dogster page. FYI: .info would be more appropriate than .com as the extension unless you plan on building a commerce site using the same domain url in the future.

A cute card, that includes a photo of your pet and a url, that you can hand over when anyone ever says they are, or know someone who is, looking for a new pet to adopt is a fabulous way to help shelter dogs find forever homes. Just let them know you’ve created the local shelter/rescue link list and they can go and find them all in one place.

They’ll appreciate it! I promise. :o)