By Before Instagram, and until only a few years ago, traveling around the planet required a reasonable aggregated sum of money. You needed to work for a couple of months or even years to save the money necessary for trip expenses. But have you ever occurred to think about making money through traveling? Quite fanciful, huh? Read to the end of this blog to learn how to earn money on Instagram as a travel blogger!
What is Travel Blogging?
Travel blogging is the act of traveling around and making blog posts about destinations, trips, experiences, people, and all you see on your journey. During recent years, travel blogging has become an increasingly popular niche on Instagram. But how does it lead to making money? This is what I’m going to answer for the rest of the reading.
In this blog, you will read:
- Who is a travel blogger on Instagram?
- How does a travel blogger earn money on Instagram?
- What are the basic requirements of a travel blog on Instagram?
- More tips for getting higher engagement on your Instagram account as a travel blogger
Who is a travel blogger on Instagram?
A travel blogger is an explorer, researcher, critique, and writer who travels the world and publishes:
- The story of every single adventure they take;
- Informative comparisons on different locations, cultures, people, etc.;
- Photos of destinations, roads, people, cultural events, historical places, etc.;
- Real information about cultural and socio-political situation of different locations; and
- Their own fair and realistic insight about what happens and what they witness during each journey;
Indeed, travel bloggers are the ones who let others experience through their experiences.
How travel bloggers make money on Instagram?
By publishing the contents mentioned above and deployment of some specific social media strategies, a travel blogger tries to drive traffic (interested Instagram users) into his own Instagram account. By doing this, the number of his followers escalate, hence an increase in post reaches and engagement.
When brands and businesses notice the high rate of user engagement in an Instagram post/profile, they see it profitable to advertise their products and services through that page. Therefore, they pay the owner of the profile to “influence” the purchase decision of their followers by promoting for those brands. There are two ways for a travel blogger and “Influencer” to make money on Instagram:
- Publishing sponsored posts: where you publish contents and introduce a specific product or service in them. You can charge your sponsor(s) for every branded post you go in exchange for the access to the vast number of audience you provide for that sponsor. That how much you can charge for every content depends on the niche you are active in, number of your followers, the engagement rate of users in your content, the quality of your content and the financial capability of your sponsor(s).
- Affiliate marketing: where you put a link in your Instagram bio which, when clicked, leads to a website or another Instagram account that provides the user with products and services to purchase. With every purchase through that link, you are paid with a percentage of the final price as a commission. You can get an affiliate link by registering into some specific websites. After registration, a particular link is provided for you, and you can put the link in your bio. Remember that it is possible to put only one affiliate link in your bio at a time.
Making money this way seems to be super easy and fun, but you don’t see many travel bloggers making a lot of money on Instagram. The reason is most probably that their Instagram accounts do not meet to requirements of becoming popular and known. Let’s see what these requirements are.
How to make money as an Instagram travel blogger?
Not every everybody is capable of getting more real followers on Instagram in order to be able to influence them. There are some prerequisites to be observed in your profile if you are willing to drive more traffic to your Instagram:
- Username: Your username must be memorable, simple and reminding of traveling and adventures. Avoid usernames alike to more popular travel pages and differentiating your only with dots and dashes. PrettyCityLondon is a famous page on Instagram with more than 370k followers, and there are many pages with usernames such as PrettyCityNewyork, PretyCityGirls, PrettyCity, etc. who have failed to attract that number of followers. This indicates that competing with famous pages with a resembling username to theirs leads to failure. Try to choose a unique and illustrative Instagram username.
- Profile Picture: Instagram profile picture is tiny , and it is not clickable to enlarge. So, you must be very careful with choosing a decent profile picture. Do not include text-only, very detailed photos. Instead, look for a vivid and large picture of people, certain locations, or the logo of your blog (if you have one). It must be eye-catching, and the color should attract people and be consistent with the theme or personality of your page so that Instagram users can remember it easily.
- Bio: Most users and travelers on Instagram overlook the importance of a complete and tell-tale bio. But your page’s bio is one of the most critical factors leading to earning money on Instagram. Your bio must include the purpose of your page, one or two travel-related hashtags, the date of your page’s birth, your current location and future destination (if you have planned to travel after this current one), your nationality and a contemplative sentence (from you or others) related to your activity. This way, your Instagram page seems more of a prestigious place for people to follow and rely on!
- Status: Your Instagram page must be seen by the public if you want to gather more followers. See below to learn how to make an Instagram private account to public:
- Business account: switching to business account provides you with some useful tools to analyze your performance on the platform. Besides, business accounts are a must if you want to earn money on Instagram. Here is how you switch a personal account into a business one:
- Quality: Quality is the last and fore-most important factor if you want to earn money on Instagram. With no quality comes no desired result, no reasonable number of followers, hence no money! You go for the quality, everything good comes for you!
To summarize:
- Instagram username must be simple, memorable and unique;
- Profile picture better be large, vivid and eye-catching;
- The bio should be complete and tell-tale;
- Profile status must change to public;
- Switch to business account; and
- Always have an open eye on the quality of your content.
More tips for higher engagement :
Be Timely: Timeliness on Instagram might be seen not as crucial as it really is. You might say: Instagram is open 24/7/365, what do you mean by timeliness!!? Let me be more accurate: You need to schedule your posts. Have a timesheet and know when you want to post. Publish at certain times to 1- get the attention of people on certain times of day, and 2- make people used to those times and wait for your posts to be published. Scheduling posts is undoubtedly a time consuming and painful process so you might want to try automation for this. Instazood provides Instagram users by a handy post scheduling tool which can especially help travel bloggers. Since Travel bloggers are on the road most of the times, there is little chance they can publish their posts just on time. Instead, Instazood schedule post service gives them the possibility to create their posts and schedule them to be published on a later time. Good news is that, unlike most of the other Instagram post schedule tools available on the net, there is no limitation for the number of posts you want to schedule by Instazood.
Create visual aesthetics: Somebody once told me that the ultimate want of a man is to have a girl to himself who is both smart and pretty! Well, quality aside, visual aesthetics always win the game! Likewise, a theme for your Instagram profile adds both beauty and quality to your page, and this the ultimate desire of an Instagrammer! There are unlimited ideas out there a travel blogger can inspire from to create an Instagram there.
Show a glance of behind the scene to your followers: People love to see what’s going on behind the scene. Why not use this desire to cause more engagement in your Instagram account? From time to time, show them how a specific, highly-liked photo on your account was taken, show them in your stories how you schedule your trips, what traveling tools you use, etc. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you share with your followers the happy and sad moments of your journey; that very moment a stranger on a trip offers half of her sandwich to you, and you are too hungry to reject the favor! Or that moment when one of your most favorite tools gets broken, and this leaves a heavy grief on your broken heart! These moments, is shared, turn into highly precious memories between you and your followers!
Include people in your feed: Photos of humans, including yourself, leaves a significant impact on the minds of people. Try to include people in your photos and stories, in a balanced way. For every people-less feed, publish a peopled one, or you can make them all human! You can see it for yourself; search on Instagram, and you will see that contents with people in them receive far more likes and comments than photos of nature, objects, or animals.
Post followers’ contents: Want your followers to share with you the pictures they took in their adventures and journeys. This way, they know that you care and want them to have a share in this adventure. Remember the content gathered from followers cannot be used for the advertisement to earn money on Instagram unless they give you consent. This is only a means for getting more engagement rate from your followers.
Instagram is more than just a photo sharing platform; you can learn exciting travel hacks from it too. Here are 15 travel hacks that I found on Instagram and wanted you to know about them as well.
Instagram Travel Hacks that every Traveler should Know
1- Zip clothes in space saving bags to not only save space but to prevent your outfits from any random spots.
dclutter.me / Via instagram.com
2- You can create your own television with your mobile if your flight does not have one!
geturwings2fly / Via instagram.com
3- Another flight hack is that you can bring an empty bottle through the security gate. Some airports have water stations where you can fill them up. This will save you a few bucks from buying water from an airport store.
kimieabreak / Via instagram.com
4- Keep one of your glasses cases to prevent chargers and earphones from tangling in your backpack.
notjusttravel1 / Via instagram.com
5- You can also use a binder clip for the same thing.
bitesizedadventures / Via instagram.com
6- Pack your shoes in a plastic shower cap, so they don’t ruin your clothes.
hotel_polotowers / Via instagram.com
7- Paint your nails with a lighter color before a vacation.
beglamrs / Via instagram.com
8- When in doubt on an airport, go left.
sotc_holidays / Via instagram.com
9- Fill your other contact cases with your expensive creams to save some space.
ellis_stine / Via instagram.com
10- If you are going to do a lot of shopping, pack a smaller suitcase inside of a bigger one.
11- Use crafting boxes as an easy and creative way to carry different snacks. It can prevent you from having trash strewn everywhere.
funcheaporfree / Via instagram.com
12- To get a discount and the best deal on a flight, you should browse through flight options on a Tuesday.
true_travelette / Via instagram.com
13- Put those little hotel soups in your suitcase to keep thing smelling fresh.
tfgescapes / Via instagram.com
14- Pack all of your vitamins into a tiny bottle instead of bringing several big containers.
kristenjoy_tiu / Via instagram.com
15- Wrap the breakable items in your socks to prevent any unfortunate accidents.
konsortiumsg / Via instagram.com
Please let us know if you have any other thing to add to these hacks.
If you find this article helpful, share it with your friends or just leave a comment below and make us happy.
Have you ever dreamed about traveling the world? I remember reading around the world in eighty days ( written by Jules Verne) when I was eight years old. This book changed my life goals and traveling became my dream.
The idea of traveling the world and getting to know other countries with different cultures and all drove me crazy! I was excited as hell. Just imagine the adventure, challenge, and fun you can have with this experience.
However, as I grew up, I began to realize that it’s not a comfortable and practical task for me. With these economic issues and expensive travel charges, you can only travel the world if you are a millionaire! God, I was disappointed.
Last week I was reading an article about affiliate and Instagram marketing, and suddenly an idea came into my head: what if you could travel the world and make money at the same time?
I suppose many of you had a similar dream to mine when you were young. So, I will show you a way to capture your oldest dream by using Instagram for business!
How to start a travel blog on Instagram?
#1 If you want to start a travel account on Instagram for a living, you need to take it seriously like having a full-time, 24/7 business.
It’s not just about photos and likes. You should consider bringing value to the companies you want to work with, and the value should be marketable and measurable. At first, you should put a lot of energy, time and self-funded traveling before you can make money from it. Like other startups, you have to think of your business as a business from day one!
#2 Research and read, A lot.
You should research a lot about being a traveler and know about other people experiences in this niche. Also, There are a lot of good business and marketing books out there. You shouldn’t reinvent the wheel! Just learn about how other people succeed and copy them!
#3 Make sure you are doing it for the right reasons
This isn’t going to work if you just want to travel for free! Start your blog because you want to share your travel stories and tips with others. Build something lasting that you can be proud of.
#4 Decide how you want to make money from day one
Don’t just think that you will get a bunch of audiences and that will somehow turn into cash for you! You should know your end goal, this way you will create content that will bring you target customers, not only readers.
#5 Find a niche that you really love
Pick a niche that you can naturally write about, without much effort. For example, I like writing about adventure, outdoors and solo female travel. You can find your tribe by going deep into your favorite niche and sticking to it.
Create an Instagram business account for your travel blogging
Now, after choosing your type, you should create your Instagram account and start posting contents.
1- Go to the Instagram login page and sign up a new account.
2- Choose the right username for your account it must be short, easy to remember, unique, relevant to your content, based on your personality and easy to find.
3- Write a good bio for your Instagram account that shows your character, passion and maybe your name! Your bio should be impressive enough to attract people. They should get curious about your future blogs after reading your bio! So they would follow you to read the upcoming content. You can use emojis to light up your bio.
4- You can switch to a business account; this can be helpful because you can have insights and stats of your account so you can find out which one of your posts is getting more engagement and you can choose the travel blogger category for your account, this will make you easier to find.
Tips on travel blogging
#1 Pick a suitable travel blog username:
- Short and easy to remember
Your username should be easy to type and spell, memorable and easy to share. You can use brainstorming method (writing down several words that you think will describe your blog). Food, adventure, culture, nature? What are you going to write about? Who are you and what is your passion? After writing everything down, you can build many usernames by combining these words.
- Don’t use numbers and hyphens
It can be challenging to do so, but it is necessary because you want your username to become famous so it should be easy to find.
#2 Write your first post/ blog.
It can be about anything; you can tell people why are you starting a travel account or you can share a picture of what you’re packing for the upcoming trip, or you can post some highlights of your latest trip.
Just get started.
#3 Create some content for your Instagram
Now it’s time to begin writing for your Instagram travel account; I recommend publishing new posts at least 1-2 times per week. But quality is more important than quantity.
What should I write about?
Try to create excellent and useful posts that have an impact.
- Your blogs should inspire wanderlust but include practical tips too.
- You can share your favorite (or not so favorite) part of a city or a country that you are visiting.
- You can give tips for fun things to do there.
- You can share some of your crazy travel stories.
- Show off beautiful nature images.
- Share a short video tour around the place.
- You can give food recommendations for the people who want to visit there.
Note! You should write about different topics first to find your type (voice) and see what kind of posts bring more engagement to you.
What if I’m not traveling right now?
You can write about your travel plans. Share your ways of saving money for travel or you can share a list of activities that you are willing to try on your trip.
#4 Grow your Instagram followers ( to get more likes, comments)
The more followers your Instagram account gets, the more engagement and traffic you will gain. So the traffic is the key to make money from Instagram.
You can start promoting your account by contacting other users who might be interested in traveling:
Find them by searching travel related hashtags or usernames, go to their profiles, follow them or leave a comment on their latest post. Or just like one or two of their posts. This way they would get curious and check out your account, and if your account were entertaining enough, they would follow you back. Although this can’t be done if you are traveling. You can’t enjoy your trip if you use your phone all the time.
So what should I do?
- You can promote your account by using Instagram ads
- You can use Instagram automation tools to interact with others for you:
– Instagram bots: these platforms can boost your account by interacting with the target users that you choose ( you can target hashtags, username, and locations). It will bring you real followers and the engagement that you need on your account.
– Schedule posts: you can schedule your blogs to post on the specific time. Maybe you don’t want to use your phone all the time on vacation, so you can arrange the post and leave the rest of posting stuff to the platform.
#5 Make money from your Instagram
After gaining the needed traffic, you can make money from your travel account on Instagram:
You can find an excellent traveling product or a travel agency affiliate program, contact them and request for an affiliate link. Then you can recommend their service or product and use the link under the post. You will get a commission for every entry or sale from your account. Just try to gain your follower’s trust and choose a good product that you are already using.
If you obtain the right amount of engagement, some companies will reach you to promote their products or services. Companies like clothing, travel gear, photography equipment, tours or even hotels you stay at. You will get paid to recommend their products to your followers.
- Sponsor campaigns with tourism boards
You can promote trips where the winning party covers all the costs but doesn’t pay for content.
There are lots of things you can do to make money from your Instagram account; you can even throw a tour every week and give a discount to your followers.
You see, not so hard right?
So what are you waiting for? Just pick up your phone and suitcase and start living your dreams.
I will be happy to receive your opinions about this article, so if you have anything to add to this article, feel free to comment us below.
Conclusion
Instagram is a platform that a travel blogger can count on as an income source. Traveling is one of the most popular niches on Instagram, and this makes it a valuable resource for travelers to earn on Instagram. If you are a traveler or have planned to start exploring the earth, Instagram has given you the chance to cover your trip expenses by only posting the photos of your journey and gathering more and more followers on Instagram.
