Should I start a blog or Instagram? Which is better?

I have both a travel blog that’s part of the Mediavine ad network and a travel Instagram account with 80K+ followers. While I am able to monetize both platforms, there is a clear winner between the two. In this post I will share my answer to the “should I start a blog or Instagram account?” question so you can decide where to focus your content creation efforts. This post contains affiliate links. When you make a purchase I may get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Find out more here.

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• Blogging course ($119.97)
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• SEO tool for blogging: RankIQ
• Travel affiliate platform for bloggers: Stay22 (get $100 when you get to 100 bookings if you sign up through this link)
• Travelpayouts

My background

I was born and raised in Romania. We didn’t travel much when I was little, except for visiting my aunt in Vienna. She was living there and those trips were the highlight of all my school breaks.

I think that having the opportunity to visit Vienna so many times made me fall in love with travel.

Then, in high school, I started to participate in international chemistry olympiads. I represented Romania at 4 international competitions and I had the opportunity to travel to Siberia (twice!), Turkmenistan, Istanbul, and Tokyo.

Then adulting happened. In 2010 I moved to the US for college, then I got a PhD, and then I worked a very demanding job in management consulting for 4 years.

And I stopped traveling because I was either a broke student or I had no time to do it while working 16-hour days at this job.

I didn’t travel to any place, except Romania to see my family, for 13 years. My only focus was to get my advanced degree and perform well at this job.

Once I had some savings from my job and flights were operating again post-pandemic, I decided to travel again. 

But I was in my 30’s. My family lived on a different continent (I was in NYC and my family in Romania). My friends were all working and had limited time off. I don’t have a partner. So I quickly realized that I had nobody to go with.

I had to make a decision: I either go by myself or don’t go at all. I couldn’t bear the thought of not visiting new places, not trying new foods, not exploring new cultures. So I decided to take my first solo trip to Paris.

Why I left the corporate world

When I came back home from Paris I decided that I needed to do it again. I needed to continue my solo travel story. It couldn’t have just one chapter. So I booked another trip, this time to London.

Once I realized how short life is and how much I crave exploring new places, I decided to switch jobs and gain my life back.

So at the beginning of 2023 I left my consulting job and I moved to a corporate America job with a much better work-life balance.

However, this office job was not fulfilling for me at all. And at the same time I had a terrible manager who was making my life miserable. What was supposed to be a dream job on paper was a nightmare. 

I spent many sleepless nights thinking that there must be more to life than this. Long meetings, short lunch breaks spent eating at your desk, creating useless power point presentations, and dealing with all the politics that the corporate culture comes with made me so unhappy. There had to be another way of making a living.

How I started my Instagram and my blog

So I started to ask myself what I would love my life to look like. The answer was easy: travel more, have financial independence and time freedom. 

Now that I was clear on what I wanted I started looking for career opportunities that would match my desired lifestyle. The first career path that I thought would be a great fit was that of a travel influencer.

So I started an Instagram account. I knew nothing about social media and content creation, but I taught myself. And in 9 months I grew my account to 10K followers.

I thought the paid partnerships would come rolling in since that’s what I heard from all the social media gurus. But this wasn’t the case. While I did have a few paid partnerships it wasn’t enough to pay the bills. This is still true at 80K+ followers by the way.

So I went back to the drawing board and I looked for other alternatives in the travel space that actually make you money. And that’s how I found travel blogging.

Reasons why blogging is better than Instagram

Growing a blog is based on SEO, not on algorithms that change often

In order to create a successful blog you just need to learn search engine optimization (SEO for short). That’s basically optimizing many things in the blog posts you write and also doing some other things outside of the blog posts themselves such that search engines show your articles on the first page on search results.

While SEO might sound scary the good news is that it’s just a series of new skills that you can learn. If you want to start a blog I put together a course that has the step-by-step guide on how to optimize a blog post for SEO.

And the great thing about SEO is that once you learn how to do it, you just have to apply it to everything you write. SEO stays pretty constant since Google doesn’t really change the way internet searches work.

On the other hand, you have to constantly change your Instagram strategy for growth. That’s because the algorithm changes every month, sometimes even faster.

Even when you feel like you cracked it, something else changes and what used to work no longer does. So you’re constantly chasing virality and growth but you don’t know exactly what works well.

That’s why there are so many aspiring Instagram influencers who are never able to grow their accounts. Growing on Instagram involves a lot of luck, even though Instagram gurus will tell you there is a recipe to success. I truly believe there isn’t.

A blog has no income limit, while Instagram does

I love the fact that you can scale a blog so much. There is no income ceiling in blogging. You could earn $100, $1,000, $10,000, or $100,000+ per month from a blog, depending on where you are in your journey. 

That’s not the case for Instagram. Why? Because you only have so many hours in a day to pitch to brands, negotiate contracts, shoot content, edit content, come up with captions, post, engage with your followers and other Instagram users. You are capped by how many hours you have in a day to do all this work. 

This is not the case if you have your own blog. Sure, you have to continue to write new posts and update old posts. But as you do that, your traffic only goes up. Which means that your income only goes up. 

Since most content you publish makes you money long-term, this compounding effect creates exponential growth. And you don’t have to work 16 hour days to achieve this. I work only 4-6 hours a day on my blog and I was able to get into Mediavine in 1.5 years. And my sessions and income are constantly growing.

There is no limit. You can make as much money as you want given that you continue to publish new blog content and update old content.

On Instagram you have to produce multiple types of content, while for a blog it’s just articles

Another frustrating thing about Instagram is how much time you have to spend to produce materials for each type of content they want from you. Video content for reels, pictures for the Instagram feed (but it better be a carousel and have music!), and more personable things for the Instagram stories. 

Plus, you have to come up with Instagram captions, hashtags, figure out what time it’s best to post, and engage with other accounts constantly. You Instagram bio also needs to be perfectly written to reflect your personal brand. Just typing about all these things makes me exhausted.

For a blog, all you have to worry about is producing new blog posts and updating old ones. It’s much more manageable and it only involves writing skills and SEO technical skills for the most part.

You can take breaks from posting blog articles, but you can’t take breaks on Instagram

If you take a break from publishing new blog posts, Google won’t punish you. For example, I never write while I travel. I don’t even take my laptop with me on my trips. Talk about time freedom, right?

And my blog posts still rank well. And I earn money while I’m away and don’t work. When I get back home and start publishing again I am able to also rank well. So there is no negative impact on taking breaks. My posting schedule does not determine my success.

That’s not the case with Instagram. You take a break from posting for more than a few days? The Instagram algorithm will punish you and will not show your content to as many people as it used to. Content creators have to constantly post on Instagram.

This is how you end up with creative blocks and burnout. This pressure to always produce fresh content and the inability to take breaks is exhausting.

Blogging is a semi-passive income stream, while Instagram is not

Blogging is semi-passive since most content you write is evergreen and continues to make you passive money a long time after you publish it.

Let me give you an example. If you write a blog post about a Bali itinerary in 2025 and it ranks well, this blog post will continue to be shown in search results and make you money even in 2027 and beyond. 

Which means that even if you don’t publish new articles for a month, the ones you published in the past still make you money. 

On the other hand, Instagram is an active income stream. You constantly have to pitch to new brands, shoot new content, post and so on. The hustle never ends with social media work. 

Blogging earnings are steady, while Instagram partnerships are uncertain

​Blogging is my main income stream. As I come from a corporate background, I love receiving a monthly paycheck. It gives me a sense of security.

And I have this with blogging. Every month I get paid by Mediavine (the ad network I’m part of) and by Stay22 (the affiliate marketing platform I use and one of the most powerful tools in the blogging world in my opinion).

So this is income that I can rely on. I know when I get the deposit each month and as my blog grows the amount I receive each month is bigger.

Instagram partnerships are tricky. There are months when I have none. And there are months when I have 2 or 3. But I can never predict when the next one is going to land. And I personally hate that uncertainty.

In addition, you always have to pitch to new brands for new partnerships. Even just this step requires a lot of work. you have to find the right contact information, create a custom pitch, follow up if they don’t reply. And despite doing all this work, the partnership might not happen.

My thoughts on Instagram partnerships

I personally feel that finding Instagram partnerships is not a transparent process at all. Only certain creators have access to the contact information of many brand marketing managers or PR agencies. And they gatekeep the information since they want to get the partnerships themselves, which is understandable.

A lot of these creator – PR firm connections are made in person at events. But if you don’t live in a major city like NYC or London you don’t have the opportunity to meet these people in person. So it’s very hard to find the good paid partnerships. 

At the same time most brands that reach out to me just offer me free products or they want to pay me $100 to post a reel, stories and link to their website. Which is an incredibly low price for all the work that would go into producing that content. 

I am not a fan on brand partnerships because the industry is not standardized. Two creators with a similar following can get paid very different rates. At the same time, a lot of brands try to get free content from creators instead of paying them. 

Even though we’re in 2025 and influencer marketing is very much a real thing and a very used marketing strategy, it still doesn’t have rules to allow for an equitable compensation for creators. 

Blogging monthly payments are automatic, while you often have to chase brands for payment for IG partnerships

As I mentioned before, I get monthly payments from Mediavine and Stay22. It literally feels like having a job and getting a paycheck each month. 

When I have brand deals for Instagram, I usually have to chase them to pay me even though we signed a contract. I’m not saying that this is the case with all brands. But there are instances when they don’t pay you on time despite having huge marketing budgets.

Which is very frustrating as a small creator. You need the money and you think it will be deposited in your bank account by a certain date, but it doesn’t happen. 

So you have to waste your precious time and send them email reminders to pay you. With blogging you don’t run into this issue at all. 

Blogging provides more value to your target audience than Instagram posts

I believe that with blog posts you can provide much more value to your audience than with short form video content. Even though you write thoughtful captions on Instagram, you can still write only a few sentences.

On the other hand, in a blog post you can write about everything in detail. And at the end of the day people who are planning their trips want to learn as much as possible from someone who visited that destinations.

It’s much easier to provide details such as what to order at a restaurant, where to find a hidden elevator to take them up a hill, or how to get to the city center from the airport.

You just can’t fit all these details in an Instagram post. I think Instagram is great to inspire people to travel and to help them discover cool spots, but it’s not great for giving them a lot of details.

Final thoughts

​Since both growing an Instagram account and a profitable blog takes a couple of years I recommend you start a blog since the return on investment (ROI) is much higher.

First, there is no guarantee that you will grow on Instagram even if you put in hard work for a few years. If you put the same amount of work towards a blog, it’s much more likely that you’ll see growth and be able to monetize.

Second, you do not need social media platforms to grow a blog. All you need is SEO skills. Having an Instagram or Tik Tok account is not a requirement for a good blog. So just focus your entire energy on the blog.

Thirdly, the business model of a blog is much more scalable and sustainable than the business model of content creation. If you want passive income and time freedom, blogging is by far the better choice.

If I were to start my journey from transitioning from corporate to the travel space again, I would start a blog from day one and I wouldn’t bother with social media accounts.

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Do you want to learn more about blogging? Check out some of my other articles.

Amateur blogging: complete guide to start a blog

Stay22 review: is this affiliate platform the best?

RankIQ review: is this the best SEO tool for blogs?

Stay22 vs Travelpayouts: which platform is the best?

Affiliate marketing for travel bloggers: the best platforms