What is a personal blog on Instagram? Have you ever wondered how it works?
In a world dominated by stunning visuals, Instagram stands as a place offering favorable opportunities for bloggers to turn the audience towards their small piece of information which best describes the underlined meaning of colorful images.
Want to learn what is a personal blog on Instagram? Excited to know how to make attractive short stories that highlight captivating visuals through your Instagram account. Then you landed at the correct place where we want to provide you with all the valuable information you need to make informed decisions and succeed in your future endeavors.
This guide will explain about what is a personal blog on Instagram, How does it work? How to start a personal blog on Instagram? How does it help you to write and post content on your personal blog? So let’s get started.
Table of Contents
What is a Personal Blog on Instagram?
It may be a state of your mood, a story, travel experience, food recipe, movie review, funny moments in your life, something which makes you happy, or a moment which made you think,for that matter anything which inspires someone who reads it,then this platform is for you.
You have emotions, feelings that you can’t express directly with someone, but you want to put it on paper, want to write a short content sufficient enough to understand your mood and make your readers involved in it, then go ahead and read it.
Instagram is a platform that allows you to create a personal account through which you can post your day to day activities, update your status, write something about politics, interesting news, a commentary about sports events, whatever the content which engages readers within 2400 characters then that is called personal blogging Instagram.
In today’s digital world all are connected through the internet that is ruled by social media. Instagram is one of most popular social media platforms or microblogging platforms having millions of subscribers across the world.
Additionally this ever growing platform has reached our homes , our personal lives and occupied our minds, hands and of course is accessible at fingertips through smart phones. You can access Instagram platform any time even in travel also. Not required to have experience on blogging, no need to be a technical person to start posting on it. Instagram makes it easy to access and write content about what you like.
Instagram is a visual platform where pictures have been given the most priority over text. This platform is dependent more on visual content than text and that too very limited text is allowed.
Instagram platform is available in both forms as a web application that you can access on desktops, laptops and as a mobile application that you can access on your mobile devices.
Instagram allows you to create a personal account, you will have a separate bio page that is the best tool for you where you can write about yourself or what you do in an appealing manner and upload photos which best describes you.
Profile page is what everyone visits, so the more beautiful you make it, the more followers you will get. There are 2 things which require your attention are niche and the content.
Finding and selecting a niche is not sufficient but attractive content and compelling storytelling also play a vital role in reaching a wider audience via impressions, reshares, likes and comments.
Based on your account type , you will get access to different tools which helps you in efficient use of Instagram.
You can start personal blogging on Instagram by creating an account and writing attractive bio, posting alluring content mixing with breathtaking images and videos regularly, may improve impression rates thus users get engaged with your content and start to follow your account.
Your goal is to reach more followers then you should focus on trending topics and post more frequently to engage your followers and make them stick to your content by providing information on latest trending topics.
Additionally, retaining followers is also a challenging task for the bloggers. To do that you have to respond to users’ comments, asking them about what information they want from you in the comments and providing their interested topics on your blog is very important.
How Does Personal Blogging On Instagram Work ?
Personal bloggers post topics which they are interested in. Any interesting content which may be daily activities of bloggers etc.. but write with gripping content with limited textual information and suitable images picturized on their own or sourced from authentic repository or royalty free images from internet.
Keep posting on your account till you gain attention from Instagram users. In the beginning, better start with content where you are passionate about and add a pinch of interesting facts or thrilling experiences that attracts users to your account and continue the same tempo regularly to retain users with your account.
In the beginning it may slow in gaining users attention but slowly your account gets more attention that leads to getting more followers. The niche you selected and topic you posted from that niche is what, your primary source to engage the followers.
On the other hand, making personal branding is also important because it helps you to make followers wait for your content. It enables you to create a loyal customer base for your brand.
Personal brands with a loyal customer base make wonders on social media. You can collaborate with brands and market their products that are related to your niche. If you provide services in digital marketing or any other services you can also promote your own services which may show substantial increase in service sales.
Personal blogging on Instagram is all about personal branding , affiliate marketing, sponsoring the content, promoting own products and services, marketing the brands and their products with brands collaborating with you.
Probably you understand the importance of personal blogging on Instagram and are quite excited to jump into blogging but little concerned about how to start , so I am here to help you.
A practical guide is prepared for you which boosts your confidence to build a personal blog on Instagram.
How Do You Begin an Instagram Personal Blog?
Step 1 : Find and choose your niche
One of crucial deciding factors for success in personal blogging on Instagram is finding the niches which are suitable for microblogging. If you start searching, you will find many niches which grab your attention.
It may be travel, art, food, movie reviews, celebrity news, politics, international news, technology, fashion, day to day activities of bloggers, personal life moments, events, money earning online, financial tips, life style, etc.. many right?.
A personal blog’s success on Instagram depends on careful consideration of niche for your blog.
It is not advisable to change the niche very frequently because it creates confusion among your followers. Once you choose your niche you can’t change the niche later.
Followers expect something when they visit your page that you should identify carefully by interacting with them and prepare content based on their comments so that they keep visiting your blog and reshare with others that helps you get more followers.
Choosing a specific niche allows you concentrate on single topic so that you can create content around that topic only so that you will gain expertise in that topic and who ever the readers interested in that topic comes to you blog for that content
Consequently you gain a reputation as a personal brand in a specific topic and brands or sponsors come to you to use your personal branding to promote their products and services.
Few points you should follow before choosing a niche for your personal blog.
- What niche are you interested in?
- Do you post information consistently on selected niches?
- Do you provide some value to your followers through your posts or niche?
- Does the niche you selected have enough market to collaborate with brands?
- Don’t forget why someone should follow you on Instagram?
Step 2 : Create an Instagram account
Creating an Instagram account on Instagram platform is easy and convenient. You can create an account on Instagram for free and no charges are collected. It is always wise to keep your name as a username for Instagram accounts as it helps build personal brand with your name.
Instagram is available as a web application and mobile application. Web application is accessible on desktops and laptops using Windows operating systems and Apple operating systems. Instagram mobile application is available on Android and Apple mobile operating systems.
- Download the Instagram application from Google play store or Apple’s app store.
- Install it and open the Instagram application.
- Tap on “Create new account”
- Enter your name then create a new password for your account and tap on save.
- Enter your date of birth and create a user name.
- Instagram accepts unique names. It wont allow the existing username. So create a unique name.
- Enter mobile number or else sign up with email address
- You will receive OTP or confirmation code . Enter the code that you received on your mobile number or email address
- You will land on the homepage.
Step 3: Set up your Instagram account
- Tap on profile from Instagram app footer from right side.
- You will land on profile or bio page of your account
- Enter your profile information, fill all the details
- Enter your blog link, if you have, helpful in routing your followers to your website/blog.
- Upload your image or any other picture and click on save.
- Enter your bio information which is displayed to public, so enter your niche related info and what you do on Instagram account
- Enter your contact information
- Click on find people to follow and follow a few
- Edit your name if you want then save it.
- By default account privacy is public. Do not change it to private unless your activity is only visible to your family, friends and relatives. It provides restricted access to your followers.
- When your account is public , your profile information , your posts are visible to anyone
- When your account is private, your profile information, your posts, videos, images, shares are visible to the users who you approve.
- By default your account is a personal account.
- There are two types of Instagram accounts First one is a personal account and the second one is a professional account.
- You can switch to a professional account from the edit profile section.
- You get access to few tools like follower insights,account performance, create ads on Instagram to reach a wider audience and grow your community.
- You can choose your category so that other similar types of accounts find you easily.
- Choose blogger , etc..option to change it any time and tap next,
- Professional accounts are of two types. It can be configured as either creator or business account.
- Creator is for content producers, celebrities, social influencers.
- Tap on creator then complete 6 steps to configure your professional account on Instagram.
- You are done creating a personal blog on Instagram.
Step 4: Understand Your Audience
In the ever changing Instagram world, what content audience shows interest may not always be the same. They shift their interest along with time.
You have to analyze the interest of the audience based on your previous popular posts. How many likes a post received, how many reshares a post got?,
Instagram provided a feature called insights to understand your audience and your account performance. You can view insights of each post, video, reel, swipe up for your Instagram stories and live videos.
Insights provide valuable information about how many followers your account reached, the content you have shared, content interactions you made like likes, reshares, saves, and comments.
Insights provide about location specific followers, age, gender and the time when they are active on Instagram.
The information you have gathered about followers’ age range, gender, the number of followers of specific location, the time they are active on Instagram and what content they engage with will give you a complete understanding of your audience.
If you understand your audience you can easily understand you are the best fit for that niche, so you can convince your brands about your strength if they collaborate with you.
The information you gathered about your audience will be used to target specific audiences like a specific age range, location based followers. This information is primarily required for your brands to who they want to target with their promotions or products.
Step 5: Arrange the Content for Your Instagram Blog Posts
You should prepare a plan about the content that you post on Instagram is crucial for your success. You need a lot of effort and time to reach your goal on Instagram. You can’t see the growth on a single day but you keep on posting engaging content on your account with at most dedication and patience.
The content you post on Instagram is known as a caption. Caption is nothing but text accompanies image or video. The text you write may be an expression or thought in your niche but that should enhance the visual content and should be useful content to the reader.
Captions can vary in length. 2200 characters are for you to prepare content. One thing you should keep in mind is that the initial text should be eye-catching and must create some interest to read further.
Always write a caption with short text that should create some curiosity or value to the readers so that they can scroll and read further. Add true emotions or facts and experiences you encountered in the next lines to captivate the audience.
Always end the post with a call to action (CTA). Then request them to like the post or comment on it so that you can respond to that to give more insights into it . It increases the visibility of the post. You can even draw the followers to your blog by giving links to your blog to know more about the post.
Step 6: Scheduled Posting
You should follow some frequency while posting on Instagram. You should plan to prepare content regularly on your niche beforehand then post in a scheduled manner for your followers so you will keep them engaged with your posts. It works for you to grow your followers and personal brand.
Scheduled posting saves a lot of time for the blogger and allows you to prepare useful content.
Based on your followers interest you make content because the followers are attracted to your earlier posts so your interest and your followers interest are matching so you can make more similar content and draft it.
Scheduled posting is an efficient feature which you can use to schedule posts. You can schedule your posts up to 75 days in advance and maximum you can schedule 25 posts per day on Instagram . There is an option called schedule on Instagram for this purpose.
Scheduled posting option is given for posts and reels. Select Post or Reels and click on next then select image or video and click on advanced settings then click on schedule and choose the time interval then tap on done.
Scheduled posting is not available for sponsored posts, cross posting on Facebook, collaborative posts.
Step 8: Increase Discoverability by Using Hashtags and Geotags
Hashtag is basically a symbol (#) followed by post related text that you can use to improve your posts visibility so that it reaches more followers. It is a kind of SEO that bloggers use on traditional blogging. But here by using related hashtags you can boost your posts’ discoverability.
If you are a food blogger you can tag your post with related hashtags for example. #recipe, #food, so that when a follower who interested in food specific posts, search with related hashtags and find all the posts which are related to #recipe, #food etc..
Instagram allows you to use as many as 30 hashtags for each post. It does not mean use all 30 hashtags. Over use of a hashtag sometimes may not bring audience attention to your post. You have to always use relevant hashtags instead of popular hashtags.
As per a few surveys relevant hashtags bring you 2 times more engagement than that of not using hashtags. You have to do proper keyword research analysis before tagging your post.
There are few tools available in the market that will provide trending hashtags on Instagram. These tools have databases which collect hashtags from users. But no tools is perfect, they give some general idea but your research and analysis provides proper hashtags.
Geotag is a location based tag that you can tag to your post from where you posted it. Whenever a user searches for a photo for a specific location then your post with that geotag will also be displayed to the users.
Geotag also increases the visibility of your posts. It improves the boost of your posts locally meaning geotag is the best way to reach local audiences and grow your personal brand leading to increased sales in products and services locally.
If you are in a specific location and tag your services with that location and post then followers nearby try to interact with you. So you can respond to them to increase your growth.
Step 9: Interacting With Followers And Engaging Them
Interacting with followers frequently is the best way to engage them with your content. Engagement of followers meaning getting more focus, likes, comments, reshares for your Instagram content.
If your content gets more engagement means your posts are getting more attention and wider reach. Followers are showing interest in your posts and your posts are helpful to them and they feel they get benefits by following your account and reading your posts.
Instagram engagement is a metric that tells how your posts are read by the followers and how they spend time on your posts.
You need to interact with your followers to drive more engagement to your content. Because they read your content and comment on your post so you have to respond to the comments and acknowledge them. It creates some positive sign in followers that you are listening to them and they keep interact with you through comments and resharing your posts
So finally your post gets more attention and more impressions from the audience. So whenever your post gets more engagement automatically Instagram algorithm thinks that your content is more popular so it gives more priority to your posts.
There are 3 simple ways which Instagram already provided to you to reach your followers. You can reach out your followers in different formats to grow your business and personal brand.
Instagram Stories :
This feature is very popular nowadays. It may be a photo or video which you can use to share your thoughts or expressions or state of mood to followers in the form of stories that live only for 24 hours after that it disappears. You can feature it in your profiles section and you can remove it later.
Stories can be shared with family, friends, or with all of your followers. Generally Instagram story life time is 24 hours till that time Instagram feeds it so it shows greater impact on your followers.
You can conduct polls or quizzes using Instagram stories and asking them to answer. This way they interact with you and you can respond to them through stories by posting the answers later to engage them to your content
Reels:
This is also a different way to engage the followers with your content. Reel is a short form of video for a typical duration of 10 to 15 seconds. You can enhance the feel of the reel by adding some filters or audio in the background.
Reels are also a way to share your thoughts , you can promote your products and services to increase your business. You can post reels on Instagram stories or post and even you can sponsor content on it.
Audiences of different ages give more preference to video content than text. So this strategy may work for you.
Inspire Your Followers By Liking, Commenting Posts:
You are happy when you receive likes or comments from your followers for the content you posted then in a similar way you inspire them by liking their posts and commenting on their content.
This interaction mutually benefits both of you parties. You can build your community this way and increase your network or connections when your followers share your content in their circles.
Consequently you get new followers because of their sharing and liking of the content and of course growing connections means building a strong community around you on Instagram platform brings more reach, more visibility and more engagement.
If you want to learn more about the difference between personal blog and microblogging you follow this link to get a deep understanding.
Step 10: How to Monetize Your Instagram Content
In order to earn some money on Instagram by doing microblogging you should monetize your Instagram account. Affiliate marketing by participating in affiliate programs of famous and well known brands and sponsoring the content and selling your products and services by using your personal branding.
You can use your bio page to add links to your own blog where you can add your affiliate links. When a user clicks on that link and purchases, you will get a small commission.
Affiliate Marketing:
You can create affiliate accounts by participating in affiliate programs of famous brands. You write a useful review of their products that should be authentic and true and add links to their products.
If any user goes through your content and feels like he wants to purchase that product, he clicks the link and purchases the item, so you will earn commission for this purchase.
Create Sponsored Posts:
You can create sponsored posts for the brands who want to collaborate with you in return you may get money or free service. Typically the earning depends on the number of followers you have on your account and the content you produce to attract the customers.
Brands find an Influencer or blogger who writes content in their niche then they pay them to write a post about their product , this is called paid sponsorship, so their product reaches a wider audience subsequently it increases the product sales.
In order to educate the users Instagram has come up with a feature that tell users upfront that this is a sponsored post. A caption displayed immediately after the username “paid partnership with [brand name]”.
So whenever a blogger promotes a product or service, he should write genuine reviews from his experience so it won’t damage the personal branding and it increases the loyal customer base.
So influential marketing is a well established trend and keeps on growing. It is one of the profitable areas of digital marketing.
Market Your Own Products And Services
If you have personal branding you can market your products and services using Instagram blogging to increase the sales. Whatever the niche you are blogging then make your products in that niche for ex: you can create e-books, online courses and sell them to your followers.
When you are marketing your products you should sneak peak product features on your page and provide the link to your website where you can write the content about your products. Always write authentic content and how your product helps them and solve their problems.
Tell them you provide service after sale and provide contact number in your bio page so they gain confidence and reach out to you to enquire about your products.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: What is a personal blog on Instagram?
A: In simple terms a personal blog on Instagram is a page dedicated to the account holder where you can write the information that you like. Information should be short, clear and crisp. You can add images to highlight the information and explain step by step to attract readers.
Q: How can I change my Instagram account to a personal blog?
A: By default the account you create on Instagram is a personal account. To change it to professional account, tap on the right side button from the footer menu then go to account type and tools.
Then tap on switch to professional account and click on continue button until you land on category selection page with page title “what best describes you”.
Then you have to select a personal blog option then tap on the done button. Then select the creator or business option and tap on next and tap on continue then click on the cross button.
Then tap on edit profile then tap on profile display toggle on option “display category label” then tap on done. Then you see your personal blog appears below your account name.
Q: What percentage of Instagram users are in private mode?
A: As per statista.com, 45% of social media users in the United States have private accounts as of Sept 2018.
Q: What are the challenges of having a personal blog on Instagram?
A: There are limited SEO but yet powerful features to boost your content reach on Instagram. You have to use Hashtags, Geotags to increase impressions of your post.
High quality content you have to publish in order to gain the attention of your followers because the Instagram’s platform is fully crowded and has tough competition out there.
Consistent posting, rich visual content consumes your time so you have to balance your time with other activities of daily life.
Q: What does blog stand for
A: A blog is a webpage where you can write about yourself, your life events, interesting moments, or share information about any particular subject. Blog make the information available to readers.
Q: Do blogs help SEO?
A: Yes, blogging helps SEO to improve rank the website on SERP. You can do on page SEO , off page SEO , backlink creation etc.. boost the website ranking.
Conclusion
I believe that you understand “What is a personal blog on Instagram”. I have taken every care to present you with a detailed guide that teaches you how to do personal blog on Instagram and how it works. This article explains what a personal blog is on Instagram and how to create it on Instagram app step by step.
In summary you have learned niche selection, writing engaging content, planning to create a strategic content , scheduling posts, frequency of posting, how to engage followers and increase the follower base, how to grow your business , connections, networks and how to collaborate with others on Instagram.
How to write engaging content using Instagram features stories, reels, interact with followers to read your content, how to signal Instagram algorithm to prioritize and feed your posts.
How to monetize content using affiliate marketing, sponsor content and your product and services are important points to remember to do personal blogging on Instagram.