If you’re wondering how to start an Instagram blog with no experience, you’ll be glad to know it’s easy to get started. Instagram blogs are microblogging due to the 2,200 character limit for captions versus no limit on traditional blogging platforms. Instagram bloggers with 15,000 engaged followers can earn around $200 per sponsored post.
Many people start a blog on Instagram with the intention of selling products from the start. If this is your goal, you can get started for free with Square Online. It has the easiest setup process and you don’t pay a dime until you make a sale. This is perfect for Instagram bloggers who don’t have months to build a complete eCommerce store. Get started for free today.
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Here are eight steps to starting an Instagram blog:
1. Create an Instagram account
Creating an Instagram account is free and only takes a few minutes. The most time-consuming step is figuring out what you want your username to be. Please note that unlike other social media platforms, you can change your username later. However, many prefer to use their full name as a username to build a personal brand.
Get started with your Instagram account in just a few steps:
- Download the Instagram app from the Google Play Store (Android) or App Store (iPhone).
- Once installed, tap the Instagram icon to open it.
- Sign up with your email address email or phone number if you are on an Android. If you’re using an iPhone, select Create an account, and then enter your phone number. You will receive a text message with a verification code to enter. Alternatively, you can use single sign-on by selecting your Facebook login.
- You will then be prompted to create a username and password.
- Make sure you have a profile public instead of private, unless you only want friends and family that you allow to read your blog.
2. Choose a niche for your Instagram blog
When learning how to start an Instagram blog, the key to steady growth is giving your audience what they expect. If you’re a travel blogger on Instagram and then post a sponsored ad for a recliner, you’ll not only confuse your followers, but they might also unsubscribe. By choosing a niche for your Instagram blog, you’re telling people who visit your blog exactly what kind of content they’ll get if they follow you.
It’s important to be careful when choosing a niche. . While you can change your focus later, doing so can confuse your audience. Some Instagram bloggers start with a broad category, like a lifestyle blog, before settling on a narrower niche, like travel or parenting. It’s also important to understand that many Instagram bloggers eventually blog on a website, which has no limits on the number of characters you can type.
Travel
Within a travel niche, you can get even more specific. Some Instagram blogs focus solely on domestic or international travel. There are entire blogs dedicated to just Disney travel. Other travel niches include solo travel, plus-size travel, family travel, and travel with pets. There’s even a travel Instagrammer who is devoting her account to camping in her living room thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some Instagram travel bloggers are finding success monetizing by organizing travel tours. There are many bloggers who also teach others how to travel more, whether it’s using travel rewards through credit cards or selling everything you own to travel. As a fellow travel blogger, I follow many travel bloggers on Instagram to get ideas for new places to visit.
Lifestyle
An Instagram lifestyle blog often features photos and posts of daily activities, hobbies, or ideas. These bloggers tend to stick to a few categories instead of posting everything they enjoy. For example, a lifestyle blogger might post about family, travel, food, and money.
Many Instagram lifestyle bloggers monetize their content through brand partnerships. These brand partnerships are often sponsored posts, where an Instagram user is paid to make a static Instagram post or Instagram story about a product. Sometimes they do affiliate programs with different brands and earn commission for sales referrals.
Food
Instagram food bloggers are also found in many niches. You have bloggers talking about things like baking, grilling, sous vide, and sweets. There are bloggers that are diet specific, such as keto, paleo, and gluten-free.Some bloggers also choose to showcase food they found during their travels or only food from a specific location, such as New York food trucks.
Instagram food bloggers can monetize their blogs through brand associations, writing cookbooks or creating your own kitchen. contraption. A sous vide blogger showing a recipe using sous vide might list their favorite sous vide machines while using affiliate links.
Money
Instagram money bloggers write about many different topics related to money. These topics include personal finance, credit cards, paying off debt, making money, investing, and even specific niche investing like Forex or cryptocurrency.
Money bloggers make money through partnerships, sponsored posts, and affiliate links. Popular money bloggers have created their own tools like budget binders and planners. Online courses, coaching, consulting, and membership sites are also popular monetization strategies for money bloggers.
3. Create a Captivating Bio
An Instagram bio is a small piece of text below your image within your Instagram profile. An Instagram profile is where users see your profile, photo, and all the posts you’ve created. It is also where users will follow you. This bio area is an opportunity to show everyone who you are, what you stand for and who you serve within 150 characters. This is an opportunity for you to make a good first impression, so you’ll want to spend some time creating an engaging bio.
As an Instagram blogger, it’s important to give your profile visitors a sneak peek . see what they can expect if they follow you. Some users choose to provide their contact information, such as an email address or phone number, especially if they are a business or want someone to contact them about collaboration opportunities. Others prefer to share a quote, their location, and maybe even a few hobbies.
Whatever you choose to display in your bio, remember to tailor it to your niche and intended audience. When you’re very specific about who you are, you’re more likely to attract people who are just like you and want to interact with your content.
4. Take or find compelling images
Instagram is a visual platform where the photos you show are more important than the captions. The photos you share must follow your brand identity design so that your image style is recognized as yours before a user verifies that it is.
This aesthetic must remain consistent in all your posts from Instagram. This helps create a cohesive look on your profile. It’s important to note that you don’t always have to use your own images to post. There are many free stock photo websites to use, such as Pexels and Pixabay. Many of these images don’t require attribution, but it’s best to double check what the restrictions are on each photo.
5. Write Your Instagram Blog Posts
An Instagram blog post is also known as a title. Your captions cannot be longer than 2,200 characters. For this reason, many consider that using Instagram for blogging means you’re writing a microblogging compared to writing an entire blog hosted on your own website.
Your blog posts don’t necessarily have to be 2,200 words. . tell a story. Many times, captions that are short and thought-provoking work very well on Instagram. The most important lines in your subheadings are the first line and then the call-to-action line.
The first line you write should grab the reader’s attention. Think of it as a single line: what will stop someone from scrolling through your post in their news feed? This should be a relatively short line so they can read it without having to click “more” to see the rest of your caption. Make an intriguing statement, elicit an emotional response, or share an offer.
Your last line should be a call-to-action (CTA). The call to action can be as simple as asking your followers to interact with you in the comments section. Or, your CTA may ask you to tag a friend, check the link in their bio for more information, or hit the Follow button. A popular call to action is “double tap if you agree” which refers to the act one performs to “like” your Instagram image.
Another important element when creating your Instagram blog posts is to make sure you’re breaking apart. the text if you are typing a lot. It’s hard to read a large wall of text without natural line breaks. You want your content to be easy to digest. Instagram doesn’t make it easy to do this within the app, so many people write their draft in notes or a word processing document before copying and pasting it on the platform to preserve formatting.
6.Use relevant hashtags to increase visibility
A hashtag is a word or phrase, preceded by a pound sign (#). These hashtags allow users to find posts on a certain topic. For example, entering the hashtag #travelinspo in the search field on Instagram displays travel photos.
You can use hashtags in both Instagram Static Posts and Instagram Stories. With static posts, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You can add up to 10 hashtags in a story. By using hashtags, even non-followers can find your content if they are searching for that particular hashtag. This allows Instagram bloggers to reach new audiences and grow their following.
To find relevant hashtags to use, many bloggers like the Later.com program. With it, you provide a hashtag that you want to use and it will give you suggestions for similar hashtags or hashtags that are commonly used with that hashtag. The program will notify you as soon as you have reached your limit of 30 hashtags for your caption.
7. Geotag your posts
To geotag a post, you’re simply adding a geographic location to tell others where a photo was taken. Some users prefer to be very detailed about where an image was taken, such as the exact name of a coffee shop. Others prefer to be more general, like tagging Manhattan or even New York.
Geotagging allows others to see where you are. It also helps others find images from a particular location. A user can search Instagram by location to find other people who have been to the place they are investigating. Including your location allows bloggers to grow their audience because Instagram users can search for posts based on location and stumble upon any post that is geotagged. If a user likes what you’ve posted, you might gain a new follower, all because you tagged your location.
8. Interacting with other Instagram users
The whole point of using social media is to be social; this involves interacting with other users on Instagram. You can like and comment on other users’ posts, and you can follow them. When you interact with other users, they are more likely to check out your profile and microblog. If they like what they see, there’s a chance they’ll follow you back or at least leave a like or comment to return the favor.
Use Instagram Stories
One of the The popular features of Instagram are the Instagram Stories. A story acts like a slideshow that is only available for 24 hours on your Instagram Story feed, unless you choose to show it. When you feature the Instagram story, it will stay on your profile in the Highlights section until you remove it.
Within these Instagram stories, users can share images, videos, and text. Stories are much less curated than a static post that appears on your Instagram feed and stays forever on your profile unless you choose to delete it. Many users choose to show behind-the-scenes footage of their daily lives in their stories. You can also create polls, share GIFs, and post a story for a select group of people to see. Bloggers can tag other users’ stories, and if they sell on Instagram, they can also tag a product.
If you have more than 10,000 followers on Instagram, you can use a feature that allows a visitor to swipe up on the story. When a user swipes up the content, it takes them to a URL of the story creators’ choice. This is a great place to insert an affiliate link.
Comment and like user posts
When you interact with another user’s content, they are more likely to return the favor. Comments you make on another post should be thoughtful, more than an emoji, and show that you actually read their captions. You don’t have to write a book: a sentence or two is the perfect length.
Following Others
One of the biggest faux pas on Instagram is the follow and follow method. stop following. . This is following a user only with the intention of having them follow you and unfollowing them once they do. It is a fairly common practice on Instagram to increase your follower count in this way, however many consider it to be in bad taste.
Instagram has said that they are working on policies to prevent this practice from happening. Your best strategy for growing your own follower list is to authentically follow other users you want to follow.
How to Monetize Your Instagram Blog
There are many ways to make money on your Instagram blog. These methods of monetization include being an affiliate of someone else’s products and services, creating sponsored posts, and selling your own products and services.
While links you add to the area will not be clickable, title of a post, You can add a link to your bio.Some people choose to create a free account with a website provider, like Square Online, and host a list of links there. This is useful if you talk about different links in each post you make.
Otherwise, you can use linktr.ee, which is another popular place to list your URLs. As a blogger with a real website, I prefer not to use linktr.ee because I want to get the page views instead of giving them to another service. I’ve also seen instances where an Instagram platform update caused accounts using linktr.ee to be temporarily closed, so be careful if you use this method.
Use affiliate links
An affiliate marketing program allows creators to earn a commission for referring sales to a merchant. These commissions are usually 1-10% of a sale, but are sometimes paid if there is a lead or a click on a custom link. Leads and clicks typically pay less than $1 each.
This is an attractive option for many Instagram bloggers because people typically talk about their favorite products and services anyway. They could also get paid for it. Sometimes merchants and bloggers will negotiate an incentive, such as a 10% discount coupon, for followers to use. This typically doesn’t affect the commission an affiliate earns and instead comes out of the merchant’s marketing budget.
Instagram bloggers can sign up for an account with rewardStyle, which the app uses LiketoKnow.it to do so. easy for them to share featured products in posts. The best part of this is that the blogger receives a commission for the sales made.
Create sponsored posts
Instagram bloggers can create content for brands in exchange for a free product, a discount or money. How much you earn per post will depend on the number of followers and engagement you receive. For example, a blogger with 15,000 engaged followers could earn around $200 for a post and $350 for a video. Instagram stories usually pay less because they disappear within 24 hours. Learn more about how to set up your blog fees.
You can make money even if you don’t have a large following because brands tend to care more about engagement than vanity metrics. The reason for this is because it’s easy to artificially inflate the number of followers and likes you get by buying them. However, comments are much more difficult to create artificially. When you have an engaged audience, they are more likely to trust you and listen to your recommendations.
Sell your own productsThe benefits of using Instagram as a blog include creating engaging content very quickly without spending any money, building a following, and potentially even making money from it.
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