Instagram has evolved exponentially in the last decade from being a photo-sharing social network to a prominent channel for business marketing and online sales. Local and global businesses are banking on Instagram to boost their brand awareness, increase their reach via Instagram advertising, connect with the customers and prospects and make sales. Whether a single-person business, freelancer, an artist or a full-fledged company, anyone can start and grow their business on Instagram. Here is a quick guide to making the most of Instagram to grow your business by adding multiple links in your Instagram bio.
You can showcase your artworks, products, write-ups or any form of talent on Instagram. To grow your business, you can direct visitors to your website or online store, notify them about your multiple campaigns, new products, blogs, youtube video, podcasts, online classes, conferences, webinars, etc.
But wait, how many links can you add to your Instagram bio?
Only ONE!
It leads us to compromise on which link to display on bio and which to neglect. There are many third-party tools to add multiple links in your bio.
But there are a few downsides too.
Firstly, when you use those bio link tools free of cost, you don't have the liberty to use all the premium features. You either miss out on adding contact forms or audio/video or any other crucial segment. And to utilise those premium features, you have to pay an amount and upgrade to a pro version.
Do you remember when Instagram banned one of these types of links considering them spammy? What if that happens again? What if your visitors click on the link and find it broken?
Moreover, when you use the links provided by the third party link tools and visitors click on them, all the traffic will direct to their website. Contrastingly if you add a link to your own website/webpage, all the traffic will direct to your site boosting the rank and conversions and making your site visible to multitudes of people.
To bring a more reliable approach to this, design your own landing page using a website builder application and manually add the links to your landing page. This approach has its own advantages as below.
This would be a safer approach to integrate multiple links into a single link and add it in bio. Instagram will never ban or block your personal links, and you can very well be assured about it.
You can initiate by designing a landing page but later you can add a few more pages and make a complete website.
You can design a customized high-converting landing page that takes your visitors down the funnel quite efficiently.
There are no restrictions to customise the page as you desire. You can add several things like a short bio, a gallery showcasing your works, links of all your social media accounts, contact forms, location, image/text/audio/video/carousel or anything that you wish.
You can design a landing page or website and add various elements free of cost unless you wish to purchase a custom domain.
When you design your own landing page or website, you get better analytics by integrating Google Analytics, search console and then you can also apply Google ads to initiate a passive income.
For building an efficient high-converting landing page, you can use website builder applications like Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or Weebly, to name a few.
In this blog, I’ll demonstrate how to build a landing page using the Wix application owing to its ease of application. You don’t have to be a techie or knowing coding to design a webpage. Wix provides a simple drag-and-drop feature to build a fully functional website/webpage.
This eliminates the need for using third party link building apps and provide better analytics.
To create a landing page/webpage/website using Wix, follow the below steps:
Open the Wix website builder. The home page of Wix looks like the one in the below image.
Click on the Get Started button to start designing your landing page.
You’ll be prompted to log in with your credentials. If you are using it for the first time, click on the sign-up option. You can also login using your Facebook or Google or Apple account.
Once you create an account and log in, your profile page will appear in the top right corner. To create a new website/webpage, click on Create a New Site option from the dropdown menu.
A list of the types of websites is displayed, and you can choose the one that you wish to create. If you are a little confused and willing to start from scratch, click on Other.
When clicked on Other in the above page, you get two options – 'Allow Wix ADI to create a website' for you or 'Create your own Website with the Editor'. If you select the first option, Wix asks you a few questions and based on your answers, a template gets created for you.
For now, let’s select the second option so that we can build a website on our own.
The screen will display various templates. You can select any template and make changes as per your requirement.
There is also an option in the top right corner ‘Blank Templates’. Click on it to build a website right from the scratch.
It may take a while to load the blank Wix editor page, hence stay a little patient. Once the Wix editor page opens, it would look something like below.
To start with, let’s add an image which could be our Instagram profile image or a logo that symbolises the brand/business. To add an image, click on the + icon on the left side and select Image from the menu that appears.
As visible in the above image, there are many options available to add all that you wish.
After adding the image, you can resize it to whatever size you wish.
You can add a text including your name/business name along with a short bio describing your brand. All the text formatting options are available here so that you can change font style, size, alignment, colour, spacing, etc.
Now, add buttons of your choice to include the various links.
Add a label to the button like ‘Buy on Amazon’ and add the link to your Amazon online store. You can also change the colour and design of the button.
Add all the links one by one, and you can also add pages to your website. To add a page, click on the down arrow from the page menu and click on Add Page button below. Rename the page and add content to it. You can also link it to one of the buttons on the homepage.
By clicking on + and gallery from the menu, you can add a photo gallery.
You can add pictures of your artworks/products by clicking on Manage Media. You can add titles, descriptions and alt text for your images.
You can also change the layout and design using the settings option.
Let’s link the gallery page to one of the buttons added on the homepage.
You can add similar buttons and link them to your Amazon store, Etsy shop or Shopify store listing.
You can add your social media links in the footer, including your contact information.
Add the social bar and link them to your social media accounts. You can also add/remove any of the social media icons.
You can add contact forms so that visitors can write to you.
Explore and add the various features available and complete the designing process and save it. Select the mobile version from the top left corner and optimise the site for the mobile version.
Whatever changes you make in the mobile version will not affect the desktop version.
You can look at the preview and if everything works well, Publish the site.
After publishing, view the site on desktop and mobile phones.
You can buy a custom domain and add it to the site. From the Wix dashboard, integrate Google Analytics and search console and access the SEO Wiz to optimise and make your site SEO-friendly.
Copy the link to your landing page and add it to your Instagram bio. You can update your landing page whenever you want, add more links and pages to your website and do whatever you wish without any restrictions or limitations.
You can also measure and analyse the traffic to your site based on various demographics and devices. This is your personal property, and you have 100% control over it.
You can also build similar landing pages using other website builders like Squarespace, WordPress or Weebly. Thus it brings a solution to the one link-in-bio constraint of Instagram.