Don't believe the lies.
GoDaddy wants you to believe that you need to spend hours,
painstaking hours building a website in order to launch your business or even
make your first sale, but the truth is you don't.
Instagram is like a done-for-you website where you don't have to do any coding,
buy any domains, or do anything techy whatsoever. You're probably thinking,
but Elise, if Instagram's a website, where's the homepage? Where's the nav bar?
Where's the contact page? In today's video,
I'm sharing exactly how all the elements of a traditional website are
already inside your Instagram app, and how you can use it to generate sales.
Now, to first understand how to use Instagram as a website,
we need to first look at the key features of a website that translate over to
Instagram. There are three key features. I'm gonna give you the first two first,
and once you understand them,
you're gonna get the most value out of the last feature,
which is the most important one to get right.
So first thing to get outta the way is this,
your Instagram profile is your homepage.
You even have a contact button option.
So all the website features that you're familiar with, that you know you love,
they're all right there on your Instagram profile.
But when it comes to your profile, here's what you need to nail: the Bio.
The Bio is equivalent to the above the fold copy that someone would see when
they land on your website. Like that copy,
your Bio has the power to attract the right person and make them stay,
or repel them away.
So even though you don't have a lot of characters to play with,
with your Instagram Bio, you gotta get it right.
So make sure you don't skip this step.
So if your Instagram profile is your homepage, let's go deeper.
Where do the other pages of your website live?
The second key feature to making all of this work is your Highlights.
Your Highlights live right underneath your Bio,
and they are those little bubbles that you see that oftentimes people ignore,
but they can be really, really powerful to drive sales for you 24/7,
just like a website would. To be clear,
Highlights are different than your Stories.
Your Stories are seen right when people tap your profile picture and they can
see your Story for up to 24 hours.
Your Highlights are saved Stories that live much longer than the 24
hour limit. Highlights act as the pages of your website.
So this is where you're gonna build out Story content that you're gonna save as
a Highlight equivalent to what you would share on your website. For example,
you might have an About Me Highlight where you share several Stories that talk
about who you are, your background, who you help,
and why you're the expert in your field.
Another Highlight could be a Work With Me option.
So you'll wanna create Stories that talk about all the best ways your clients
and your customers can work with you easily and quickly, all through Instagram.
Depending on your business model,
another Highlight you might wanna have is Products.
Maybe you don't offer services or coaching.
So you wouldn't have a Work With Me Highlight,
but you would definitely have a Products or a Collection Highlight. Again,
you're gonna create Instagram Story content that you're then going to save to
these Highlights so that people can can look at them at any time, 24/7,
and continue to drive sales to your business. If you're a service provider,
like a copywriter or even a real estate agent,
you might wanna have a Services highlight that talks about all the different
services that you offer. You see where I'm going with this, right?
Don't forget about having a Testimonial or Client Review Highlight.
This is really important so that people see that you're an expert in your field.
You've done this and you have the proof. Last but not least,
make sure you have a Contact Me Highlight.
Just like you would have a Contact Me page,
make sure you have a highlight that has all the best ways for someone to get in
contact with you. It could be your phone number, it could be your email address.
It could simply be a call to action to reply to the Story in order to message
you so that you can follow up with them in the DMs.
Now for the strategy to work, for your Highlights to become like your website,
you need to have this key feature turned on: your Instagram Stories archive.
It should be on by default, but here's where you can make sure. On your profile,
Go to the hamburger icon in the upper right and then tap archive.
And you can see here that I'm in my Stories archive.
You have other versions of it as well. And if you tap Stories archive,
you can see where your post archive and your live archive lives.
So go to the Stories archive option and then tap the three dots in the upper
right and go to settings. And then you're gonna make sure that this option,
the very first option, "Save Story to Archive" is turned on.
Now let's say you're nodding your head and you're loving the concept of turning
your Instagram into a website,
but you don't have your Stories archived turned on,
or you don't have any previous story content that would work for any of these
main categories that you need to build as your Highlight.
Let me show you how I would quickly and easily go ahead and create an About Me
highlight.
So you are gonna go back into your Instagram and you are gonna have to create a
fresh Story.
Don't worry about this disturbing your Instagram followers because the Story
might look a little out of sync with what you've shared before.
They're not gonna remember.
And the key is you are creating a Story right now that's gonna live way beyond
24 hours, because it's going to live on your profile forever.
So go to your homepage and then swipe to the right and open up your
Story. So let's say we're creating a Highlight that's called About Me.
So the very first Story could be a simple introduction.
Just say who you are and who you help. Like this, "Hi, if you're new here,
my name is Elise Darma and I am an Instagram educator for small business owners
who offer coaching, services, or products.
I help those busy business owners save time and make more money through social
media even if they're not Insta famous and even if they don't have a lot of
time." Alright, now that I've added some text to my Stories,
I actually want to prepare people to watch the next Story in the sequence.
So I'm going to hit the three dots and go to draw and I am going to choose
the arrow option,
and I just wanna make sure that I'm drawing a little arrow so that people are
encouraged to continue to watch my Stories. That's fine. Now I'm gonna hit done,
and now I'm going to tap your Stories and I'm gonna share to my Stories.
Now this is the first Story in our sequence.
I'm gonna go back to Stories and I'm gonna record the second one in my sequence.
So for this one, I recommend you talk about why you're the expert.
Why do people choose you outside of others in your industry? Here's an example.
"Why work with or learn from me? Well,
I've been an Instagram marketer since 2013 and I've worked with over
30,000 business owners. Together,
they have accumulated well over $2 million in sales,
all for free, all from the Instagram app." Done. And again,
I'm gonna go ahead and add text or make sure I'm using the caption sticker (if I
had it) so that people who are watching the Story without the sound on can still
see what I'm saying. And now I'm gonna go ahead and post this to my Stories.
So now I've posted two Stories that are gonna turn into my About Me Highlight,
but I need to do one more. This one is the most important,
and this is the call to action to my viewer what I want them to do next,
especially if they want to get to know me or work with me.
So I'm gonna go back into my Stories and here I'm going to give them a call to
action. So here we go.
"If you'd like to get a free taste of what it's like to work with me,
reply to this Story with the word 'calendar' and I'll send you a free Reels
calendar that's gonna give you a month of ideas of what you can post to your
Reels in a way that will actually grow your business. So go ahead,
reply to this Story with the word 'calendar' now." I'm gonna make it really bold
and simple to see. Alright, my third Story's ready to be posted.
Let's go ahead and post it to my Stories. And now if I look at my Stories,
I can see that this is the first one I posted, my intro.
This is the why work with me,
and the third call to action Story is being posted to my Stories right now.
Now that those Stories are posted, the next step is to build out your Highlight.
This is gonna be your About Me Highlight,
just like your About Me page of your website.
You're gonna go to the plus button in the upper right and choose Story
Highlight.
And now you are going to select the three Stories that you just recorded,
and these are the ones that you want to use to make up your Highlight.
Then hit next and then give it a title. We're gonna call it About Me,
and then you can hit edit cover.
And so what you can do is grab a screen grab from one of the stories if you'd
like, or if you tap the button on the left,
you can actually upload an image from your camera roll.
So this is where you can add something that's maybe got your brand colors or
something that works well for that Highlight. And there we go.
I'm gonna add the title. This is going to be called About Me.
You want to keep the titles really,
really short because once you add it to your profile,
you'll see that longer titles are going to get crunched.
So About Me I can read, but if I scroll back,
you can see one that says Lisbon Retreat or Procrastination. So you
Can see, see there are some ones back there that are getting cut off.
But I really recommend you keep your Highlight titles short,
just like the pages of your website would be called. Now,
those Stories we just made, they're live right now,
but only for the next 24 hours.
You can see that people are starting to watch it already.
The fact that we've created this Highlight means that these stories are gonna
live on my profile forever, or for as long as I want.
Let me show you what this Highlight looks like from another account's
perspective. So if I tap on About Me, I'm going to see my Story.
Good thing I added that text so I can also read what I'm saying.
And then I see this reply CTA.
So I'm going to type in "calendar" and then hit send.
And then when I'm back on my profile and I see that this account messaged me the
key word, I'm gonna follow up with them. One Highlight's done,
which means that one page of your website's done.
Your next step is to go ahead and build out all the Story content that you're
then going to save as Highlights to be the pages of your website. Now,
in terms of your content strategy,
it doesn't make sense to spend all this effort building out your Highlights and
then ignoring them. Yes,
they will always live on your profile as those little bubbles underneath your
bio,
but it's a smart idea to build into your content strategy calls to action
where you're directing people to those Highlights. So let's say in the future,
I'm doing another post about who I am. I can also mention, "Hey,
check out that Highlight on my profile called About Me for more information."
Now I've hinted at and even mentioned the third and most important step in this
entire process. Did you catch it?
The whole point of this strategy is to get people to take action on your
Highlights and reply to them, which then goes to your Direct Messages folder.
So if you are ignoring what's coming in through your DMs,
you are ignoring potential leads and sales to your business.
Business owners don't prioritize this enough:
checking their DMs every single day.
You can sign into your Instagram account.
Just go to Instagram.com and you'll see your DMs easily accessible on desktop.
So if you're someone who prefers to type back, you'll really like this option.
You can also check out Facebook's Meta Business Suites, I think it's called now,
where you also have access to your DMs on desktop. But honestly,
the most powerful and easiest thing you can do to manage your DMs 24/7 is
to set up a chatbot tool.
This tool will automatically follow up with anyone who replies to one of your
Highlights, even while you're sleeping. Now,
when I say things like automatically or DM automation, people often think this:
spammers, bots, icky sales tactics.
But automation has come a long way,
and this is exactly how biz owners are nurturing their leads and their sales
24/7. With a tool like ManyChat,
you can easily set up an auto reply so that if anyone replies to your Story with
a specific word, they're gonna get a DM back from you immediately.
People want things instantly,
so if they're waiting three days for you to manually get back to them,
you might lose them. But if they're getting an automated instant reply,
and sure they might know it's not coming from you, the human, but you the bot,
that's okay.
They're still happy because they're getting that instant gratification of what
they want. And so while ManyChat is a tool that I use and recommend,
and it's the key to setting up those auto replies to Stories,
the really cool part is that when those stories become Highlights,
if that automation's still running,
people can respond to that Highlight long after the Stories expired and that
automation will still fire. Translation?
Your Highlights are going to continue to generate leads and sales for your
business long after those Stories expired, and yes, even while you're sleeping.
So when you're building out your Stories that are gonna become your Highlights,
make sure you do the key first step first, which is create your automations.
This is so much easier than building out the entire puzzle.
You only have to do these three key steps.
And now that you know how to run Instagram as your website for free to generate
sales 24/7,
make sure you don't miss this step of setting up your automations.
Watch this video next.