As a travel blogger, Instagram is perhaps one of the best tools at our disposal to building your brand. While it sounds easy, it is a heck of a lot more work than how easy it seems popular Instagrammers seem to draw in likes and follows. Not to fret though because I’ve brought in Melissa of A Broken Backpack to spill all of her secrets to success and how she was able to get to 10,000 IG followers in a matter of 6 months. Enjoy the episode!
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Summary
Melissa is one of the latest big stars in the travel blogging scene and as you’ll learn from the episode, she’s been able to accomplish so much in such a short amount of time. In just six months she’s been able to grow incredible following including hitting 10K on Instagram. I wanted to take this chance to greedily find out more about how she did it so that you too can get to this level without breaking a sweat.
In this particular episode, you will learn
- About Mélissa Giroux
- How she started her journey from Quebec that eventually lead her to Australia
- The beginnings of her blog and her transition from French to English
- Growing A Broken Backpack
- Ability to reach amazing growth in only 6 months
- Advantage of working on a farm
- Networking with other bloggers online – one of the keys of blogging
- Methods and tools
- Facebook groups
- Triberr
- Social sharing groups
- Mistakes
- Started on WordPress.com (non-hosted)
- Accidentally deleting the blog
- Challenges
- Migrating from WordPress.com to self-hosted
- Getting hacked – Security is important!
- Figuring out all the “techy” things around WordPress
- Getting Hacked
- Malware adding links to the blog
- Getting black listed by search engines
- Bluehost coming to the rescue and SiteLock (removed the Malware automatically)
- Growing Hacking Social Media
- Started with Twitter, Facebook and then Instagram
- Latest growth primarily from Instagram
- All about building your brand
- Why: Easier to reach target audience (backpackers in 20s)
- Does Instagram drive traffic to your site?: Hard to see in the stats but if you set up an Instagram landing page (link from bio), you could track it.
- Observe:
- Look at what successful accounts are doing but also what other similar bloggers in your space are doing
- What captions do they use? What hashtags do they use?
- What do they do to get so many followers
- Tricks:
- Use relevant and popular hashtags that people are searching for
- Tagging other accounts that feature Instagrammers (@adventure_culture) to get noticed
- Make sure to tag the location
- Hashtags in the description or comments? Put it in the comments to make it more professional. Did not see any difference in putting it in one or another
- Use smaller travel related hashtags. Don’t use the big ones like #wanderlust
- Build following by liking photos and comment on hashtags that you commonly use
- The follow and unfollow game only works at the very beginning.
- Focus on good photos and hashtags (don’t share photos that aren’t related to your brand)
- Re-use old photos when you’re not travelling
- Useful tools: Latergramme, Iconosquare, Crowdfire, TagsForLikes
Links mentioned in this episode
- A Broken Backpack
- We Travel We Blog
- ElegantThemes – Divi Theme
- Bluehost
- Bluehost SiteLock
- Melissa’s Instagram post on reaching 10K following
- Latergramme (known as Later now)
- Iconosquare
- Crowdfire
- TagsForLikes
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Hi Will – Great article. Thanks for mentioning Triberr.
I just listened to this podcast episode tonight – some great insights from Melissa, especially about being observant and interactive with other ‘grammars. 🙂
Wow, that’s great to be able to get 10K fans on Instagram! Have you explored much on Pinterest Will?
Yes I have and it’s been huge for me!