It’s no secret that attention spans have decreased significantly over the years, with research suggesting that it has shrunk from 2.5 minutes to 47 seconds. The rise of digital media is a key factor behind this change.
With that said, many people now prefer watching short videos instead of reading 1,500-word articles, hence the rise of apps like Instagram and TikTok.
But did you know that Instagram also makes an effective microblogging platform?
Simply add a concise copy to your visual content, and you’ve checked all the boxes in an effective, modern-day informational resource:
- Visual focus for keeping users engaged
- Concise and information-packed copy for quicker message delivery
- Social interaction since users can like, comment, and share
So, this begs the question: how do you start an Instagram blog from scratch?
Stay tuned, as this article shares an 8-step guide on how to make this happen.
What Makes Instagram a Good Platform for Blogging?
First off, blogging and microblogging are two different things:
A blog is hosted on a website, and the blog posts are typically long-form in nature with comprehensive content (just like this one!).
Conversely, a microblog is a subcategory of blogging, where users share short, concise posts—typically under 300 words—on social media or dedicated microblogging platforms.
Instagram falls under the microblogging category. In addition to being primarily a visual content-sharing platform, users can insert valuable captions in their posts and even include calls to action through their bio.
Currently, Instagram has 2 billion monthly active users, primarily dominated by the 18-34 age group.
Imagine getting a sliver of that action?
If your target audience falls within that category, pursuing an Instagram blog might be the game-changer for your business.
Let’s look at some benefits of starting an Instagram blog.
3 Advantages of Running an Instagram Blog for Your Business
There’s more to getting on Instagram than just meeting your target audience in a separate marketing channel. Instagram blogs can open many doors, expediting the process of reaching your business goals.
Below are three ways an Instagram blog can help your business grow:
1. Build a personal brand
Starting an Instagram blog allows you to showcase your company’s personality, values, and expertise to a wider audience.
Since Instagram is primarily visual, this is a perfect opportunity to establish your creative brand elements. This includes your logo, color palettes, fonts, and other design languages.
For people who are more visually inclined, consistency in your branding elements strengthens brand recognition (how well users recognize your business through visual cues) and brand recall (how well users can remember your business from memory).
Over time, followers will recognize your posts instantly. Consider the visual identity Chris Do created in 2023. When you see his palette, you immediately know it’s him!
2. Monetization Opportunities
Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t directly pay creators based on follow count, likes, or views. Still, there are plenty of ways businesses can make money off the platform.
For one, you can sell your own products and services. Say, you’re an ecommerce site that sells a physical product, like a blender. Nothing beats uploading videos of your product blending different kinds of things—fruits, vegetables, protein shakes, whatnot.
Even if you sell digital products, like courses or ebooks, you can easily leverage reels to add snippets, share informational nuggets, and demonstrate your expertise.
For instance, The School of Hard Knocks is famous for interviewing successful people and extracting wisdom-filled business lessons from them.
Then, they use their popularity to upsell their course, The School of Mentors, where you get exclusive mentorship calls and join a community of entrepreneurs.
Conversely, other ways to earn are by using affiliate marketing, by adding links to your bio, or using stories with link stickers. Moreover, you can collaborate with other businesses or influencers and get paid for every feature or promotion, whether in posts, stories, or reels.
3. Direct Audience Interaction
Unlike traditional blogs that require knowledge of Google Analytics or Search Console to measure engagement and site performance, Instagram simplifies this process.
Likes, comments, and DMs are straightforward factors that inform you about how well you’re managing your social media account.
In the same sense, you can also take advantage of these features to connect with your audience.
For instance, replying to comments positions you as a business that cares about your target market’s opinions or thoughts. Alternatively, DMs are a quick way to convert warm leads into paying customers or encourage them to schedule a discovery call.
4. Good Source of Referral Traffic
In modern marketing settings, running a business is synonymous with owning your own website.
Starting an Instagram blog gives you quick access to referral traffic back to your main site when users click through your links on IG.
For example, you can post teasers that invite curiosity, like to read a full article, shop a product, or sign up for a service.
Of course, the amount of referral traffic you drive to your website will heavily depend on how effective your social media marketing efforts are.
Now, let’s head on and explore the 8 steps on how to start blogging on Instagram.
A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Start An Instagram Blog
While it may seem unconventional, leveraging Instagram as a microblogging platform offers immense benefits, especially if your target market is highly visually oriented.
So, how exactly do you start a blog using IG. Let’s explore the steps below:
Step #1: Create an Instagram Professional Account
If you’re reading this article, you likely already own an Instagram personal account yourself. This is good enough for people who wish to keep their accounts private and only connect with a few people.
But that’s not what business is all about.
Creating a dedicated Professional Account sets your business a cut above the rest. These accounts can come in two forms:
Choosing either gives you access to the same kind of tools, features, and insights, so it isn’t like you are missing out.
However, if you are creating an Instagram blog to showcase your business or sell your products, then definitely choose a Business account for formality’s sake.
Conversely, if you want to establish a personal brand as an accompaniment or support to your business, a Creator Account might suit you better.
As a blogger, having a Professional Account would be beneficial for several reasons:
1. Detailed growth data
Professional Accounts gives you comprehensive analytics to check audience demographics, best posting time, follower count, engagement rate, etc. This gives invaluable insight concerning what type of blog content your followers best respond to, so you can streamline your content creation process.
2. Sponsored posts
Professional Accounts let you run ads, just like Facebook, to help you reach a wider audience. This is especially helpful for boosting popular posts that gain a lot of traction or engagement.
3. Paid partnership opportunities
While running an Instagram blog for your business is meant to promote your products and services, you can also leverage your popularity to collaborate with non-competitors for a mutually beneficial partnership.
For example, featuring their products on your page for a paid commission deal, such as this one:
4. Off-platform links
Direct your audience to an off-Instagram link in the stories or a link via the bio. This helps capture potential warm leads and convert them into paying customers.
5. Streamlined messaging
Filter your direct message box into general, primary, requests, and channel to send messages or reply to your audience accordingly.
6. Flexibility
With the creator profile, you have exclusive access to Instagram Creator Studio. You can access this on your desktop to check analytics and schedule Instagram posts in advance.
How to set up a creator account?
If you already have a personal or business account, it’s easy to shift to a creator account with a few simple steps:
1. Open your Instagram account and click on the three lines on the top right corner.
2. Click on ‘Settings’ and then on ‘Account’ in the menu.
3. On the bottom, click on the option which says, ‘Switch to creator account,’ and press ‘continue.’
4. You’ll see a list of categories from artist to video creator. Choose the appropriate one for you.
5. Next, you’ll see a pop-up confirming the switch, and you’re done!
If you’re planning to create a new profile for blogging, you can follow the standard method of signing up on the platform.
And voila, you’re ready to begin your blogging journey on Instagram.
Step #2: Choose your niche wisely
Choosing a blogging niche might not be necessary, especially if your business is already existing and simply wish to create an Instagram blog for your Business Account.
In this case, selecting a niche might be irrelevant since your content will naturally revolve around your products, services, or brand messaging.
However, if your Instagram blog will be based on a Creator Account, or want to branch out from your business into more personal or diverse content, choosing a niche becomes important.
A Creator Account allows you to blend personal branding with subtle promotion, helping you connect authentically with your audience without making it look like you’re simply trying to humanize your company.
Choosing an appropriate blogging niche is crucial primarily for two things:
- People only follow creators or businesses whose niche or value coincides with theirs
- Your selected niche or creative content style must support your long-term business goals
If you’re a clinical psychiatrist marketing your services, it might not be wise to share skits that exploit the conditions faced by the clients your handle, right?
In addition to getting cancelled, you will build a negative reputation in that niche and burn your business to the ground.
For example, here is a blog on parenting.
Dr. Becky shares insights, snippets, and videos talking about all sorts of things, and her bio features her parenting resources for parents with kids ages 0-18.
She didn’t create a Business Account for her company, Good Inside, but created a personal niche that still served her company’s goals and bottom line. See?
Now, to decide a niche for your Instagram blog, ask yourself these questions:
- What do you want to be known for?
- What type of people do you want to attract or build a community with?
- What will you be able to create content about consistently?
- What is something you’re keen on taking forward as a career?
These questions will help you narrow down a few options to choose from and move forward with as your niche. It can be as broad as ‘fitness’ or as narrow as ‘fitness for moms.’ The more specific you are, the greater you will establish your authority and convert your audience.
While it’s essential to consider your audience, also take into account your interests and the earning potential of that niche.
You can always start with a broad niche and then transition into a narrower one as you move forward.
Step #3: Work on the structure of your profile
Now that you have an account and have decided on a profitable niche for your Instagram blog, it’s time to spruce up your profile. Before you can get your audience to consume your content, they will look at your profile.
You know what they say, “first impressions last.”
When a user clicks on the ‘follow’ button, they’re investing their time and attention in anticipation of getting quality content from you. However, before they can access the content, your profile’s overall look and feel should capture their interest.
Here are some important elements to consider when setting up an Instagram blog:
Username
If you already have an account on other platforms, such as your website or a social media platform like Twitter, stick with it for consistency.
However, if you’re deciding on a fresh handle for your Creator Account, then pay attention to it. It can be related to your name, but for SEO purposes and enhanced visibility, consider including your niche keyword.
For example, Neha is an Instagram coach, but her username says neha.social because she helps coaches with their social media problems.
Having a niche-specific username is catchy and allows people to relate to what you do.
Profile picture
Your profile picture is the first thing users see when they visit your profile. It should reflect your brand colors or show you doing something related to your niche.
If you have a food blog, show yourself making food. If you have a travel blog, consider sharing an aesthetically pleasing travel picture. It sets the tone for your entire profile, so don’t overlook its importance.
Here is an example:
Bio
This is the most critical aspect of your Instagram blog because it tells the audience all about your page. Think of it like your elevator pitch of what you do and what users can expect.
It’s your first chance to impress them and leave them wanting more to scroll and consume your content. There’s a limit of 150 characters, so you must be concise and straightforward with what you write.
Talk about:
- Who you are
- What you do
- For whom do you do it
You can also tell your audience about the kind of content they can expect from you. The last line of your bio should always be a Call-To-Action (CTA) with a link to book a call, your website, or a bridge landing page with multiple link options.
Remember, your goal is to have your audience convert. Don’t hold back on creating an impressive profile that compels them to click on the ‘follow’ button and eventually convert into paying customers.
Your bio must answer this question: “Why should I follow this account?”
Step #4: Create an editorial calendar for your blog
Instagram is a platform that requires consistency. You’ll have to plan your content with research to create targeted content for your audience. This also includes preparing an editorial calendar to put things on auto-pilot and ensure you’re posting content regularly without fail.
You can use content calendar tools to create a plan for your Instagram content. These tools help streamline the process and collaborate if you have a team.
When you’re creating your editorial calendar, include all Instagram features and distribute your content strategy evenly amongst them. These should include:
Feed posts
Feed posts are the regular 1:1 (in the past) or 4:5 (modern) dimension posts. These can be static images, carousel posts, and IG reels of up to 3 minutes.
Ideally, you should post over 2 feed posts every week in varying formats consistently.
Stories
In the past, stories used to be snackable 15-second video clips or 7-second images that stay on your profile only for 24 hours unless you add them to a specific highlight on your profile.
Today, IG has updated stories to last up to 60 seconds, which is still snackable but enough to get your message across to viewers.
It’s a great way to interact with your audience, ask them questions, or show some behind-the-scenes stuff.
Reels
This recent feature on Instagram has resulted in a massive reach for influencers and bloggers. These are bite-sized videos of up to 60 seconds where you can add transitions, music, effects, and much more.
Ideally, you should post 3-4 reels a week to reach a wider audience than your followers. You can easily create them using Reel editors and then schedule them for uploading using social media scheduling tools. This way, you’ll have a regular output of Reels.
Instagram live
It’s one thing to post content and engage with your audience, but it’s another to chat with them in real-time. Instagram Live is a perfect way to speak to your audience, get them on camera, answer their questions, or even collaborate with another blogger.
It’s a great way to keep your community engaged and show up on camera to build trust. Ideally, you should do at least one live session per week.
How to find content ideas?
- Competitor research
- Search for relevant hashtags and observe the kind of posts others are creating
- Survey your audience and ask them the type of content they like to see
- Imagine yourself as the audience, and analyze what kind of content you would want to consume
- Type in niche-specific keywords on Quora, Reddit, and Answer the public to find more ideas
Pay careful and sufficient attention to content planning. No matter how good-looking your profile maybe, if you don’t research and plan content, it won’t make a difference.
In your content calendar, you can also include a distribution and promotion strategy to leverage different methods of sharing to boost your content’s reach.
This is perhaps, one of the most important aspects of getting started on Instagram.
Step #5: Draft an effective hashtag strategy
Before you start creating and posting content, you need to draft an effective hashtag strategy. There is a 30 hashtags limit on Instagram, make sure your hashtags are relevant to your niche and content.
While in the past people could follow hashtags, today, hashtags are more of an organizational tool to help users find specific content using those tags.
Basically, the right hashtag can get you discovered, boosting your visibility on Instagram to reach an audience wider than your followers. Of course, it’s not as easy as simply using popular tags and expecting them to work.
Here are some best practices to find the right hashtags for your profile:
- Create 3 sets of hashtags, each with 20-30 of them. These should be a mix of small hashtags (less than 50k posts), medium hashtags (50k-500k posts), and large hashtags (500k to 2M posts). Use them alternatively and see what works best for you.
- To choose your hashtags, hover over to your competitor’s profile and observe the hashtags they use.
- As a general rule of thumb, include hashtags relevant to your post’s context, location, niche, and content buckets.
- Use a few generic yet relevant trending hashtags in between the niche-specific ones and avoid banned hashtags
- You can also try using hashtag tools like Hashtagify to segment your hashtags.
- Experiment with your hashtags and use the post analytics to see how they’re performing.
Hashtags are an essential part of Instagram and can incredibly increase your blog’s reach and place you on the explore page. It can get more eyes to your content and a greater engagement and follower count—all organically.
Another way to expand your reach is using geotags specific to the location you’re targeting. It can help you target an audience particular to a location.
Step #6: Start creating your blog posts with quality content
Now that you have your foundations in place, you can kickstart the main element of blogging, which content creation.
Let’s not forget that Instagram is a competitive place, and many people are already creating content on similar topics, but that shouldn’t stop you. To work your way around this, aim at creating quality content.
The more value you provide, the more your audience will engage.
Here are some essential aspects of content creation that you should pay attention to:
Graphics and Images
Instagram is a visual-heavy platform, and so your graphics and images cannot be average.
Think of it this way. If you can’t hook your audience with some killer images in the first few seconds, you’ve lost the opportunity to sell to them already.
For creating carousel posts or video thumbnails, you can either hire a graphic designer to do them for you or do it yourself using drag-and-drop tools like Canva or Visme. They have premade templates you can modify, such as filling in your content, adding a few elements, and branding them with your colors and font style.
If you have a fashion, travel, or food blog, there would be more images than graphics. For this, ensure you’re clicking high-quality pictures and shooting high-resolution videos. If your content isn’t visually appealing, your audience won’t bother staying, no matter how good the caption is.
Once you’ve caught their attention, it’s time to make their interest worth it.
Remember: People come for the visuals, but they stay for the value.
Once your graphics and content are sorted, you can start implementing your content calendar and set your strategy into motion.
Content captions, image copy, and video scripts
Image copy refers to the content written within the images in your post. If you’re creating educational carousel posts, the image copy must be direct with plenty of white spaces.
Ideally, each image in the carousel must address one point at a time and encourage users to swipe and read the rest. The message must be direct and communicated in fewer words.
Here’s an example of image copy on a carousel post meant for Instagram.
Video scripts will be used when you create videos, specifically reels.
It needs to have a hook to keep the audience engaged. Again, you want your video to fit into the duration limit, so keep it crisp and brief.
There are instances when it’s better to keep the video brief and simply write everything on the caption, especially when you’re about to drop some comprehensive knowledge bomb to users.
Captions are one of the essential aspects of Instagram.
It should complement the image or video and add more context to it. Highlight your storytelling skills here to allow your audience to connect with your captions more. Make it enjoyable with a few emoticons or bullet points if you have a longer caption.
As a general rule of thumb, include a CTA in your caption. This can be a question that motivates the audience to leave a comment or a direction to view the link in your bio. It should be compelling enough to make them want to take action.
Step #7: Set an analytics system in place
If you don’t analyze your Instagram efforts, you won’t improve and amplify your results. The famous bloggers you follow on Instagram have reached that position after implementing and analyzing a working Instagram marketing strategy day after day.
Measuring these analytics is essential to check whether your efforts yield the results you expected and how you can improve them even further. This way, you can work on your strategy and achieve more significant results regarding followers and conversions.
Remember, the more you work on your Instagram strategy, the more eyes you can attract to your profile. This can unlock a variety of money-making opportunities. So don’t hold back on analysis.
Instagram has an in-built insights dashboard which you can use to study the following:
- Number of accounts reached in the past 7 or 30 days
- Number of profile visits, website clicks, and impressions
- Top-performing stories, posts, and reels
- Number of interaction on posts and stories in the past 7 or 30 days
- Daily follower count
- Demographic information
- Best posting time for your profile
You can use these insights or third-party Instagram analytics tools to understand how your content is performing and how your audience interacts with it. As a blogger, you would also want to analyze the number of leads or conversions you’ve received.
Using this, you can tweak your strategy and make it even better to make your way towards monetizing your audience.
Step #8: Explore ways to monetize your blog further
Once you start building your following, you’ll come across several ways to earn money and monetize your following. Let’s look at some of these:
Sponsored posts through influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is on the rise, and it’s one of the most common ways bloggers and content creators are making money on Instagram.
When you build an audience for your Instagram blog, brands for your industry will want to approach you to endorse their products and services. This is a win-win situation where these brands leverage your followers to drive additional conversions while you earn a fixed rate for the promotion or a commission for each sale (or both!).
Being an influencer means holding an authoritative power. You can influence people, shape their thoughts and endorse the products you use.
However, with great power comes great responsibility. As an influencer, it may get tempting to sign every brand deal that comes your way, but you need to be selective. So, build your blog, look for opportunities on influencer marketing sites, and sign only brand deals that aren’t against your business goals and align with your principles.
Sell your products
Instagram blogging is all about leveraging the social media platform to pursue your business goals—sell your products. Whether these are digital products (ebooks, masterclasses, exclusive communities, or courses) or physical products, Instagram is an additional avenue.
Selling your products on Instagram requires a strategic approach. You need to build trust through your free content (a.k.a. lead magnet) to encourage people to buy from you. The link in bio, CTAs in captions, and story links are all for selling. Through your free content, you can warm up your potential customers and persuade them to buy from you.
Affiliate programs
Not every brand deal pays you money to post on your profile. Some of them can be on a commission basis also.
Say you promote a digital product by a brand on your profile. You can get a commission on every sale the brand makes through your custom affiliate link.
These partnership programs are a great way to keep earning money by endorsing the products you’re confident your audience will be interested in buying.
If you want to monetize your blog in multiple ways, you can use a URL lister like Linktree in your bio to allow your audience to choose wherever they want to navigate.
Conclusion
Starting a blog on Instagram may seem easy on the outside, but its maintenance requires a lot of effort. Everyone can create an account, but running it successfully and using it to make money is a whole different ball game.
However, you can use this guide as your roadmap to set up a profitable Instagram blog that can help you make big bucks. It’s all a matter of being loyal to your followers, providing genuine value, and being consistent. The work lies not in content creation but in being regular with that content creation.
So, use this strategy and pave your way to endless monetizing opportunities and a lucrative Instagram blog.
Happy blogging!
Author Bio:
Eduard Klein is an International Digital Growth Marketer, Blogger, and Entrepreneur with a global mindset. He guides people through the process of starting and growing a digital business, and to ride the wave of digital technology and marketing without getting swept away.