Instagram Profile Basics & Tips

The Momentum Marketing Podcast

Here's everything you need to do to boost your Instagram profile today. Hey there, I'm Jillian Kendrick and welcome to the Momentum Marketing Podcast. I'm a mama, a wife, an entrepreneur and a three time best selling co-author. In each episode you'll get real world, practical advice and strategies and maybe a parenting tip or two along the way. If you're ready to create a business that supports your family and your lifestyle, then you're in the right place.

Hey, there, I'm so excited that you're here with me for another episode of the Momentum Marketing Podcast. My team and I have been doing this since earlier this year in 2023.

And I just have to say I've been looking back at all of the episodes and I'm really, really proud, I'm proud of this episode. I'm proud of the content. I'm proud of the system that we built to create it and to put it out there into the world. I'm proud of my team who edits it and designs the cover images and, like, does all of the extra stuff. And this has been such an amazing rewarding creative experience and I love it so much today we're talking about other ways that you can be creative and feel fulfilled using Instagram.

I know a lot of people have an Instagram or maybe you have one and you haven't done much with it or you're wondering like is Instagram the place for me? Instagram is amazing.

There's so many people on Instagram of all different ages. Instagram is incredible. And if you aren't using your profile and getting the most benefit out of it that you can, you're definitely missing out on potential sales and customers or followers because your profile and the page that they see is an opportunity for them to get to know you a little bit better without investing too much time or too much effort. And so you want to make it super easy for them to get to know, you see the highlights, watch all of your best stuff quickly, easily and in one place and your profile really is a great way to do that.

And I really, I'm only doing this and know about this because I'm doing it for myself. But this is a great opportunity for me to showcase what I'm doing in real time and to pass that knowledge off to you.

So first off, you can always have a profile picture. In fact, you can have, like, a picture and an avatar that's new. It used to be just one picture and that was it. But make sure that you have an up to date picture. If you don't go do a photoshoot, go take a nice selfie, get a shot or get your hair done. Look really nice. Put your best foot forward or take a picture that shows who you are. If you produce content, that's funny and satirical, your photo should reflect that. If you produce content, that's for a personal brand, the photo should be of you. If you produce content that's for a business brand, the photo should be something that represents that brand or that business. If you do mom content, you might want to include your kids. I include my son in a lot of my content and I talk about him a lot but it's always the back of his head or a side profile or something else. We have chosen as a family not to show his face on the internet and that's what we're comfortable with. But it's such a huge part of my life that I include that in a lot of my branding, a lot of my content, a lot of the stuff that I do and I talk about being a mom. So there's ways to include your children but do it in a way that's safe. So that's the profile picture. Make sure that you have one. Definitely.

Next is going to be your name. And this should be, if you're a personal brand, it should be your name. If you're a business brand, it should be the business name you can also always put something like a nickname or you can put full name and then a pipe or a dash or a hyphen or maybe an emoji or something and then put your nickname or your handle or, or the thing that people know you buy or your brand or your company name. There are ways that you can be really, really creative here. It doesn't just have to be your name or your business name. You can put other things, which is really nice.

Next is going to be your user name. This is gonna be your handle you're at. Whereas I'm @automatedmama because that's my life. I run an automation agency. I teach sales funnel automation and I'm a mom. That's my whole life. So that's a pretty great, great username. Make sure that your user name or your handle again is reflective of your business or your brand or the thing that you're doing. I see a lot of people now who want to be Instagram influencers, which is great. That's fine. It's a really fun creative business and there's passive income in that. So that's nice. But I see when they're first starting out and they kind of flip flopped from being one person or one entity on Instagram and now they're going off and doing something else. So a girl that I follow, she started out as a style brand, then she moved into doing more Disney related content and now she does Disney style content.

So even though the word style is in her profile name, she's kind of changed just a little bit and the name is still reflective of who she is and what she does. But it's not a full representation of what she's doing right now if you know what I mean. So that would be again a great place in your handle to represent yourself and give people an idea of what you do and why you do it or who you do it for or give them an expectation of what your content is going to be about.

Next, you can do pronouns. I've chosen personally not to add any pronouns. I have just chosen not to do this. I'm not making a political statement or anything else like that. If pronouns is important to you, I think that's great. And you can add the pronouns that you want to be called. And in pronouns, you can actually put it in different languages and choose whether or not to show your followers the pronouns or to show it publicly, which is really nice.

Next is going to be your bio and in the bio, this should again be a representation of who you are, what you're about, what you do and give them a quick five or six word at the most snippet of who you are, what, what you're about and what kind of content they can expect to get from you here. I have mama, wife, entrepreneur, watch my latest free training click. And then I have a downward facing hand emoji because underneath where this goes in the profile is my link that I have to everything and that's going to be the next thing that we talk about. So then you can add external links. And typically, I think Instagram only lets you have one. Sometimes they like you have more than that. It might depend on like how many followers you are if you pay for their service or it might depend on other factors that I'm not familiar with. But you can definitely have one link, which is where people started getting into having things like Linktree is a really popular one. There's a few others that I don't know of and can't remember off the top of my head. But these are great because rather than having one hyperlink that goes to one place like your website or an opt in or your lead magnet or training or a coupon or some content or your affiliate links or something else. You can have that link tree be all of your links, the highlight reel all on one page. This is really great. I like using things like this personally. We don't use Linktree. I have a page on my website that we've designed to look similar to Linktree. And honestly, I think you could do this very easily even if you don't have a URL or a proper website. Yet you could go to Google and create a Google site and have a Linktree that you don't have to pay for. That's super simple and easy to create that you could do on your own. It doesn't have to be this super fancy high tech sort of thing. As long as you're getting the content out there and making it easy for people to see your stuff and share it and look at it and consume what you have to offer.

That's the purpose. So, rather than pay for Linktree, because it's just another thing that we would have to pay for as a business. I had my team create a page on our website that looks very similar and has buttons and images and things and it really is my highlight reel of all of the stuff that I would want somebody to see. Specifically, I was actually looking into doing some Amazon affiliate stuff as well because I've had a lot of people recently asking me things like, well, what kind of mic do you use and what kind of lighting do you use? And what computer do you have and what's for this and what's for that? So what I did was I added all of that of, like, my favorite things, the stuff that I can't live without under our Linktree. And because I don't have enough followers, you might be in a similar situation as me. I don't have enough followers to justify being in the Amazon influencer program, but anybody can be in the Amazon affiliate program. So what I did was we added all of my affiliate links to the page that all of our links sit on and then it makes it just so much easier that anybody can click on that and we can get paid for sharing the same stuff that we already use, which is great.

You could put gender as well if you want. And there's multiple options for gender, which is really nice to see. Next you can have a specific page that you are connected to, I believe with it. It's within Facebook and you want to make sure that this is connected because when you start running ads, you'll create the ad inside of Facebook. But then the ad is also going to be shown on Instagram. And unless your profiles are connected, you can't do that. So you want to make sure that those pages are connected.

You can also have a category. So if you're an artist, a blogger, a clothing brand, a digital creator, an entrepreneur, a writer, a gamer, a photographer, a creator, et cetera, you can choose which category where you believe best represents you. You can also have contact information because I have my link that goes to everything and people can access all of that relatively easily. I've chosen not to add contact information to my Instagram profile. But if you were a brick and mortar, you would probably want to have contact information. You'd probably want to put your physical address or a phone number where somebody could call and purchase from you. Right?

And then action buttons are really great because this is an opportunity for people to order food, book now, learn more, opt in, sign up, apply. Whatever action you want them to take. So for me, I have it set up to go to the opt in for my latest free training. And that's really great for me. I like that option even though it's in my link page as well. It's right there. Super easy for them to click on.

And then what's great too is you can also add Highlight and the highlights will show up below your profile information. But above all of your posts and videos. And the reason that I really like this is because it's again, it's a highlight reel of your stuff or if you're an influencer that makes money off of your affiliate links or people purchasing something and then you get a commission from it, you can have different categories of highlights and you can name each of those categories. So let's say you had one for clothing, one for programs or products, one for ticket sales, one for something else. They all come from your stories. So anything that you want to be posted as a highlight you first have to post it as an Instagram story and then you can post it as a highlight after the fact. So you can't take one of your posts or videos and use it as a highlight. It has to be within your stories. But this is also a great way for stories not to disappear because I hate it when you post a story. And then 24 hours later, you have to post more content, right? This is a great way. If you have a story that you've posted that you really, really like or that was super attractive to people or you got a lot of good feedback on, you can then take that story and you use it as a highlight, which is really nice. So then it doesn't disappear. The other thing that I like is as you add new highlights, you can order them in such a way that you can change the title of the highlight.

So rather than having categories like I just suggested you can have, you know, close and affiliate links or products or programs or something else, you could use the titles of those highlights to then spell something out. So if you wanted to direct them to something very, very specific, you could even make the images of each of your highlights, an arrow pointing a certain direction. And then the last or first highlight could be the one thing that you want them to look at. That's just another fun creative way that you can make your profile stand out and be different than other people's. And then of course, all of your post, your videos, your content, all of that shows up below. And there are fun ways that you can do posts and content. I've seen people that have an every other kind of like a checkerboard pattern with their content that they'll post a certain thing one day and then a certain thing the next day.

And then when you look at it holistically at all of their posts, it shows up as like this checkerboard pattern that looks really cool. I've also seen people use posts in Instagram and post them in a chronological sort of way so that when you look at all of their posts holistically, it shows up as, like, whole images rather than each individual image, which is really cool.

So there are some fun, exciting and super creative ways that you can boost your Instagram profile today. It doesn't take that much effort to do a couple of these to create the link page.

Like I said, if you don't have a website, you could go and create a gmail account right now and go to Google sites and create yourself a Google site that you can then put your highlight reel or your products or your programs or your offerings or your freebies or your affiliate links or whatever you have. You could put all of that right in there. And it's awesome. This is the game, this is marketing 101 stand out, be different. Attract attention there it is.

I hope that this has been helpful and that you can take this list and go back into your Instagram profile and make tons of amazing updates that will be super easy and fast. I promise you could do this today in a couple hours or less. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the Momentum Marketing Podcast. If listening to this has brought you value, improved your life, or given you insight on how to build your own momentum, then please share it with a friend and I'll see you on the next episode. Bye.

The Momentum Marketing Podcast By Jillian Kendrick Episode: # 27 Topic: Instagram Profile Basics & Tips Contact: [e-mail] IG: instagram.com/automatedmama jilliankendrick.com/webinar/