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 your 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. May Third party app provide Instagram users by a handy post scheduling tools 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, 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.
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.
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.