A personal blog on Instagram is a beautiful inscription in the profile header that distinguishes an ordinary visitor to the platform from an advanced user. The app offers every creative person the opportunity to create a personal blog on any topic for free. Who are bloggers? They are ordinary users who have their own ideas about a particular subject and are not afraid to share their personal opinions in their own blog. Let’s consider and suggest how not to make mistakes and choose a good topic, the nuances of proper profile design, and the secrets of promotion.
What is this?
What does a personal blog on Instagram mean? The beautiful and pompous name hides a personal user page. In fact, creating it is not a problem, all difficulties arise over time.
By its nature, a blogger’s personal page is a live digest, a kind of journal of their personal life, filled with quality unique content. It’s not just about running your blog correctly, it’s about having unique creativity that will be appreciated by the audience at the right level.
There are both advantages and disadvantages in creating a personal blog, and everything needs to be considered in a complex. If a young blogger takes on a topic that is not their own, they will quickly run out of ideas and desire to come up with something new to surprise the audience. As a result, such blogging will have no future. You need to love what you do! How can you not make a mistake and choose the right topic?
How to choose a topic for a successful blog
Attracting visitors to your profile and building an active subscriber base is based on a clear strategy. Do you really think that posting a few beautiful pictures in your stories is enough? No!
First, you need to develop the concept of your profile, but most importantly, the themes for your Instagram posts for your personal blog! You can work hard and create a unique masterpiece, or you can simply look at what is most popular among popular bloggers on the platform.
Examples of popular blogs
Interesting blog topics for Instagram can be divided into categories:
- Entertainment and travel. This includes humor, motivation, congratulations and gifts, movie and book compilations, news, surveys, quizzes, and contests. Different types of travel: cycling, road trips, and hitchhiking.
- Educational and useful topics. For example, a cooking blog, photography and knitting lessons. The educational niche is actually very broad and covers a lot of interests. Tips, instructions, comparative reviews, and personal experience stories work great.
- Selling topic. In this direction, the app offers to use a special business profile that has all the useful tools for promotion and analytics. Often, you can find selling accounts of large brands on Instagram, bright examples are OREO, BuzzFeed Tasty, Nike, Apple.
The freshest ideas can be taken from popular bloggers. How about the beauty direction? Look at how many companies advertise their products on the platform, don’t lose direction, look at examples of what content is in the stories and how advertising fits in. Want to create a selling profile? You need to take just two steps: decide on a topic, post interesting content, and gather your target audience. That’s all.
Proper profile formatting
Before starting to run your blog on Instagram, it is not enough to just create an account, you need to fill it out properly, as regular users of the network first pay attention to the beautiful design of the main page.
Header filling
A new account without a single follower is not a reason to give up from the very beginning. To start a personal blog, begin by filling in your profile header. Write about who you are, what you are passionate about and interested in, and what your page is about. Be sure to list the main topics of your future blog! The ideal option is to indicate two or three topics.
You can insert emojis and smileys, but everything should be moderate.
Important! If you have other websites, the profile header is the perfect place to place active links for navigation. To properly format your future business profile, don’t forget to include contacts, email, and add buttons!
Choosing an avatar and nickname
Creating your own avatar and setting a nickname is not that difficult, but the main thing is to make sure that this information catches the attention of a new visitor in a fraction of a second. When a user first lands on your profile, they generally make a decision in just a couple of seconds, simply by looking at your avatar and nickname, it becomes clear who they have come to.
- Your avatar must stand out, especially if it’s the profile of a creative girl or guy. The photo should catch the eye and be memorable. You can make a unique avatar using art sketches.
- An original, catchy nickname. As an option, you can use something from your real data, for example, beautiful usernames are obtained in English. If it’s a business profile, it’s necessary to include keywords that will play a role in promotion.
As you may have guessed, the concept of “like/dislike, caught attention/didn’t catch attention, useful/boring” applies to avatars and nicknames. As usual, the first followers of the account are friends and family, ask them to evaluate your profile from the outside and take all the comments into account.
Unified style in the feed
An important aspect is maintaining a consistent style in posts on Instagram. All posts should be of good quality, which can only be achieved with good lighting. If it’s evening, additional lighting is necessary, but the best is soft daylight without direct sunlight in the frame.
Beautiful photos and posts can be created using third-party apps, filters, and colors, changing the standard image and adding colorful effects. As bloggers say, if you have an idea and a suitable photo, filters will be found. With a little experience, anyone can easily turn a post into a masterpiece.
The most popular services with filters for Instagram are: Snapseed, Foodie, Afterlight, Clarendon, Gingham, Moon, Lark, Reyes, Juno, Slamber, Crema, Ludwig, Aden, Canva.
Beautiful story
What is a personal blog? It is primarily about lifestyle. In essence, situational content is published in stories, which means fresh and current photos taken ‘right now’. Many new users take these words literally, taking photos regardless of poor lighting, unsuitable surroundings, and atmosphere, posting them in stories and waiting for a reaction that never comes.
Creating a personal blog is easy, but making it truly interesting is difficult. Remember, situational content called ‘right now’ is already perfected posts that have gone through many filters and transformations! Beautiful stories complement publications with interesting descriptions.
Don’t be lazy, today photosetting is not just about beautiful posting, but text format is gaining popularity. Often, new visitors subscribe because of creative thoughts and quotes. Analyze which posts with or without descriptions work best with the audience and continue in that direction.
Regular posting and communication with subscribers
If you think that blogging is an easy task, you are deeply mistaken! Every day, the quality standard for Instagram posts is getting higher, and followers are becoming extremely selective, desiring not only unique but also high-quality content.
What to write about and how to entertain your audience should be decided individually, as using other people’s “tricks” will not surprise anyone. The only requirement for a live blog is regular posting, at least 1-2 posts per day. In stories, you can post not only pictures but also videos. Requirements for publications:
- The maximum duration of a video in stories is 15 seconds.
- The recommended picture format is 1080×1920 pixels, 9:16.
- The format for videos is MOV, MP4, Gif. Video resolution is 720p.
- An active link can be placed in stories if you have more than 10,000 subscribers.
Can’t decide on a topic for your morning post? Just wish your followers a good day, a great mood, and good impressions. Perhaps such a post may not be entirely “to the point” for the feed, but for stories, it’s just what you need!
Don’t worry if you’ve run out of creativity, share your experience with the public, how you decided to create a blog from scratch, ask your followers what they are interested in. Use a working idea, organize a contest or lottery, and appoint a prize. Everyone likes that!
How to promote your own blog on Instagram
The most important question is how to promote your personal page, how to gain your own followers, so that there is an active audience that pleases the eye. The first thing to remember is that mass following is a prohibited practice. This method of inflating a large subscriber base has proven itself well in promoting commercial accounts.
For example, a visitor is attracted to a page with sales, they see that the presented product or service may be useful in the future and therefore subscribe or save the page to bookmarks.
How to set up the promotion of a personal blog. A user sees that they have subscribed to them, they visit your blog, they don’t like the topic, and they also notice that you have more outgoing subscriptions than incoming ones, of course they leave the page, thinking it’s a bot.
Massliking
What methods work in promoting a personal blog? Mass liking and auto-commenting. Important! With mass liking, we are not working to increase the reach of a new audience, rather we focus on quality and work with the audience already gathered. The scheme is as follows: 1000 likes on 250-300 profiles in one approach in the first week. During the second week, we add one like to all new posts.
Advertising purchase
If you have a good budget and don’t mind spending money on quality promotion for your personal blog, the best choice is to buy advertising from well-known bloggers. This way, in a short period of time, you can set up several directions to attract the most interested visitors.
However, strategy is also important here. Be careful, like a sneaky cat! Everything should be creative, think of an engaging info occasion, as aggressive advertising “in your face” won’t interest anyone now.
Another effective method for promoting your profile is mutual advertising. For this, your blog should already have at least a small base of active subscribers, more than 1000 followers. The strategy is simple, choose profiles similar in coverage and topic, contact the owner and help each other.
Contests and lotteries
It is not for nothing that they say that the audience often asks for bread and circuses. Contests, lotteries, and giveaways will help attract not just active participants, but if people like it, this is your guarantee of permanent subscribers.
There are a great many ideas for conducting various contests on Instagram. They can be held an unlimited number of times, on a variety of topics. These can be simple gifts and giveaways: for a mention in stories, for tagging a friend in a comment, for a post on the page. The Instagram audience is so loyal to such events that there are no losers here.
How realistic is it to promote a personal blog without investments?
Who among popular bloggers can honestly say how much money was invested in promoting and popularizing their profile? No one will tell you. Starting a blog for free is not difficult, but it is unlikely to reach 50,000 active subscribers without investment from scratch.
The main rules for novice bloggers:
- Content is more important than promotion! No one says that promoting an account is not necessary, but content always comes first. If the profile is filled with mediocre content, without soul and love, promoting such an account is pointless!
- It is impossible to gain hundreds of thousands of followers without a budget. A rare exception to the rule is an incredibly viral content, but that is just from the world of fantasy.
- If a profile is created for monetization, a strategy should be thought out before starting work on a business profile.
- If there is no budget, do not use free automated promotion services, as they usually work with bots, which only harm a fresh account. Instead of promotion, you can quickly get banned.
Believe in yourself. You know that there are more than 850 million registered users on Instagram today! Some just come to see popular news, while others actively run a personal blog on Instagram, often sharing their experiences and impressions with a large audience of subscribers for free. Do not hesitate to ask for help, google different information, sign up for free webinars, and create your own creativity, do not copy or “lick” other people’s accounts.