Everything You Need to Know to Start a Travel Blog on Instagram

How to Start an Inspiring Instagram Travel Blog

Travel blogs are a way that travelers share information and travel inspiration online. They can be through personal travelogues, articles about travel and other opinion-based written content. Travel blogs usually feature beautiful pictures designed to inspire others to travel and capture the essence of a destination. Here you’ll learn how to start a travel blog on Instagram.

Decide What Kind of Travel Blogger You Want to Be

People start travel blogs for many reasons. Some start blogs to fund their travels around the world through advertising and other streams of blog-related income. Professional travel bloggers spend a lot of time building their brand, that is, their online presence and image. They may also reach out to brands for advertising opportunities, as well as brand partnerships and ambassadorships.

Others simply wish to share their travels with their friends and family, or even a wider audience, but are not looking to make money from them. For some successful professional travel bloggers, their blog has given them the freedom to live nomadic lives and travel full time while making money from their laptop. For others, their blog is just a way of combining two of their loves – travel and writing. These hobby bloggers use their blog as a way to journal about their personal travels and share their memories with friends and families.

Figuring out why you want to start a travel blog on Instagram is important as you move forward and make other decisions related to your travel blog.

How to Best Utilize Instagram as a Travel Blogger

Instagram is a great place to go for travel inspiration. You’ll find numerous travel accounts for any type of traveler that will inspire you not only with destinations to add to your bucket list, but practical tips such as packing lists and how to dress for a long flight.

Being heavily centered around visual images, Instagram is a unique platform that can be utilized by travel bloggers in a variety of ways. For some bloggers, Instagram functions as another way to present their brand to the world. The platform works for them as a way to gain followers and drive traffic to their website where they write longer travel articles. For others, Instagram is their main platform. These bloggers use Instagram posts and stories to share mini blogs about their trips, offer travel tips to others and promote brands they have chosen to be affiliated with.

Choose a Niche

Most Travel bloggers choose a niche or theme for their Instagram. Will you focus on family travel? Fashion? Food?

Establishing a niche will help you choose what to share and what to focus on when writing your captions and hashtags. Make sure your Instagram bio is clearly written to capture your personality and your niche so that potential followers know what to expect from your feed. Your niche will largely determine what you post about. Whether it is high-fashion pictures of you in beautiful destinations, beautiful landscape scenery or family-focused activities around the world, having a niche helps you choose the types of images to post.

Choosing a User Name

Careful thought should also go into choosing your Instagram handle, or user name. This name will be the way people find you on Instagram and is a big part of how you are presenting your travel blog to the world. Once you know your niche, start brainstorming a list of possible user names. Then, search Instagram to see if they are available. While you are at it, you should check other social media sites to make sure the name is available there too. It would be a bummer if you wanted to start a Facebook down the road with the same user name but the name was already taken.

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Take Inspiring Photos for Your Travel Instagram

Having a travel blog on Instagram does not mean that you have to be a professional photographer, but having some basic skills and an eye for a good photo makes a big difference. Watch a few videos about taking travel photos so you can learn some basics. Cell phone cameras are okay and work well with Instagram. Nowadays, you can even quickly edit your photos right on your phone with apps like the Lightroom. Once your Instagram travel blog has become more successful and you are sure you want to stick with it, you can consider investing in higher end equipment such as a DSLR camera.

Whether you choose to post pictures centered around a specific color scheme, or you choose to use the same filter on every photo, it’s nice to have a specific look in mind when choosing photos to share on your feed. Not only will it give your followers a good idea of what they can expect from your page, but it will also present your brand in a cohesive way. This makes your images more recognizable as yours and builds your general brand perception with followers.

Get Out There and Travel!

One key thing to starting a travel blog on Instagram is that you must actually travel and take unique photos. Authenticity really shines through in travel posts and your followers can tell a big difference between someone who is actually traveling and taking their own photos and someone who is promoting content with images they got from other places. If you do not have the time or budget for a big trip, that is okay. You can promote weekend trips close to home, or even attractions in your own town or nearby places.

Make the Most of Hashtags on Instagram

Successful Instagram travel bloggers live for hashtags. Implementing the right  relevant hashtags can really boost the number of people who will see your photos. Use them to create a community around an idea, tag other pages that feature and promote travel bloggers, or capture followers who might be using hashtags to search. There are a lot of possibilities. It is worthwhile to spend some time researching possible hashtags and deciding which ones you want to share with your images. Keep a list of hashtags you use frequently for easy future posting.

Promote Your Instagram Travel Blog

In addition to hashtags and being featured on other, established pages, another important way you can gain followers for your travel blog on Instagram is by promoting your account on other social media sites or your website (if you have one). Share your Instagram posts on your personal Facebook, in travel inspiration groups and other places that allow sharing. Embedding your Instagram images in any blog posts you write is also a good idea so people can easily find your Instagram.

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