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

PODCAST NOTES
  • 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

Thanks for listening

Thank you for listening to the show!  It’s really because of you that I do these so I appreciate all the support.

If you like what you heard and can’t wait for the next episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see on the left side of the page.

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About author View all posts Author website

Will Tang

I'm the writer behind Going Awesome Places and through its growth, I've learned a heck of a lot from trial and error. I have a passion for helping others succeed and through TBB my hope is to empower you with what works (and what doesn't) so you know exactly how you can take your blog to the next level.

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