Instagram might not generate as much organic reach as TikTok does, but it still gives you more exposure than networks like Facebook and Twitter. A recent study from Social Media Examiner found that 78% of marketers see Instagram as a key channel in their strategies, rivaled only by Facebook.
However, the biggest drawback associated with cultivating your tribe on Instagram is that you can’t share links in your posts. You can share links in stories, but when you publish regular in-feed posts, web addresses aren’t clickable. If you want to drive web traffic from Instagram, you need to post links in your profile’s bio and then add a call to action in your post captions, asking people to click the link in your bio.
This makes the bio link a crucial part of your Instagram marketing strategy. The good news is that there are many ways to use this link in bio. You can send people to a landing page where they can sign up for your email list, a product page where people can buy your product, or any other page that will help you reach your marketing goals.
You could also get creative and try out some new tactics that your competitors aren’t using. This is why in this post, I have covered some link in bio ideas that you probably haven’t tried before.
1. Ask for financial support
When you are an influencer, working with brands is a nice way to earn money. But you won’t always have brands to work with. Also, constantly posting content promoting various brands’ products can make your account look too promotional. This is why it is important to look for ways to make money without partnering with brands.
One way is to create your own products. You can make more money with this, but it takes a lot of work. You need to research your audience first, create the product they want, then set up a marketing funnel and launch it. And there’s always the risk that you will fail.
If you don’t want to spend all this time and carry the burden of risk, you can simply ask followers to donate. Followers who like you and look forward to your posts, understand the time it takes you to create quality content. Often, these people will gladly make donations to help support you as a creator.
Influencers and streamers already make a ton of money from getting donations on sites like Twitch and Patreon, but generating a steady flow of premium content is a major commitment. Instagram has a “donate” sticker for stories where the donations go to a charity, but they don’t have one for feed posts, and it isn’t used for creators seeking to monetize.
Using Lightricks’s free Link in Bio solution, you can add a tip jar powered by Stripe to your custom landing page. It’s a great way for creators who are just getting started with monetizing to test the waters of financial support from Instagram fan communities as a revenue channel. Followers can simply add the amount they want to donate and accompany it with a comment.
2. Get creative with custom audiences
Retargeting warm audiences is the best digital advertising strategy. There’s no other method that will drive a higher ROI. You can create a simple custom audience by embedding your Facebook pixel to your link in bio page and retargeting everyone who visits it. Not all bio link tools support this, but several leaders in the space, including Sked Link and Instabio, do.
To take this tactic a step further, you can take some creative approaches and reach more people and also boost your ROI. Here are a couple of ideas.
Embed a video in your link in bio page
When you retarget everyone who visits your link in bio page, your conversion rate won’t be at its highest, as a lot of people might abandon it in seconds. But if you only retarget people who engaged with your page for longer, you will naturally generate more conversions.
One way to encourage this engagement is by adding a video to your page. Social networks like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram let you create custom audiences consisting of people who have watched your videos, regardless of where the videos are embedded.
You can then retarget these people. You can also track how much of the video they watched and only retarget people who watched it completely or close to completion at least. This will naturally improve your return on ad spend.
Take advantage of link retargeting
You don’t need to add a pixel to a page to track audiences who visited a website – you can also attach the pixel to the link so that everyone who clicks on the link is added to your custom audience list. You can use advanced URL shorteners like Rebrandly, easy to implement this.
You can take advantage of this and team up with other influencers. When they are promoting their own products or donation page, you can ask them to attach a pixel you provide to their URLs. This way you will build an audience of people to retarget.
When you use this strategy, make sure you are very specific about the URLs to which you will add your pixel, as you can create different offers for different audiences based on the page they visited.
You can try out this technique with Facebook and Instagram ads as they are the best networks for retargeting and generating warm traffic.
3. Use it as a portfolio
If you are a designer, illustrator, or photographer, a portfolio website is something you should set up. It’s a great way to showcase your talent and get some clients. But if you are just getting started and can’t afford to spend on a domain and hosting, you can take advantage of link in bio tools.
Many of them are free or at least offer a free plan and have a template where you can display photos. These link in bio templates are mainly for displaying the photos in your Instagram posts, but you can add photos of your work.
Here’s an example from OpenSea. It shows pictures of NFTs for sale on its website. Once you save up, you can invest in a professional website.
4. Use a content lock
A common strategy people use on their Instagram accounts is to link to a landing page where people can sign up for a lead magnet like in this link from Cloris Kylie.
It takes you to this landing page.
This strategy works for growing email lists, but a simpler one you can try is a content lock. This is where you simply share a link to a blog post or a guide and let people view only the first few paragraphs. But hide the rest of the content and only give access to people if they sign up.
The great thing about this is that you don’t need to create another lead magnet. You can simply add a link to the blog post and use a plugin or software to hide the content and only give access to it after they sign up. There are many free WordPress plugins that allow you to do this. This too can help grow your email list.
You might also want to add a popup to this blog post. As it can boost sign-ups even further. For best results offer a different lead magnet with the popup. People who aren’t interested in the blog post might prefer this.
5. Personalize content by geo-location
One of the keys to successful marketing is specificity. If you know more about your audience, you can create specific offers and messaging and boost your conversions. When someone visits your website through organic means, it is hard to know everything about them from that first visit, but you can figure out their location and serve them a personalized viewing experience.
So, for your link in bio, you might want to create different landing pages for different countries and then serve them based on the location.
For example, when someone visits your website from America, you can use a writing style that they can easily process and you can display the pricing in dollars. While if someone visits from a country like Spain, you can show a landing page that’s written in Spanish and display a price that’s in Euros.
Creating this requires a bit more technical expertise. You might need a designer’s help along with a hosting service that can recognize the location of the visitor and display the right page. Tools like Croct can help with the implementation as well.
5 tips for creating better profile bio links
The above tactics will help you stand out and generate more attention and conversions from your bio URL. But if you want to get even better results, you should try out the best practices below.
1. Don’t offer too many options
One of the secrets of high-converting landing pages is that they focus on one thing only. A sales page focuses on generating maximum sales while a squeeze page focuses on generating maximum leads. Designers and conversion rate optimizers remove any other distractions from the landing page as too many choices lead to the paradox of choice.
Too many options can confuse visitors so they abandon the landing page without taking any action.
This is why if you want the best results out of your link in bio page, you too should focus on one goal. If providing other options is crucial to you, you can add a couple more options. But don’t go beyond this.
Have a good think about what your most important goal is and then create a link in bio page that will help you reach this goal.
2. Customize it with your branding
You should brand your link in bio page just like you brand your website. Many people who visit this page from your social media account will discover you for the first time. So, this branding should make a solid first impression that will persuade them to check out your other social media accounts and website.
Include elements like your headshot or logo, background images that you use on your website, brand color palette, etc. Also, make sure the writing style matches that on your website.
You should even make sure that the other pages that lead away from your profile bio page resemble it. As they too are important for creating a strong brand impression.
3. Ensure it loads quickly
People don’t like waiting for web pages to load. They usually only give it a few seconds. This is why you should use a tool like Pingdom to ensure your page loads within 3 seconds at least. If it takes too long you might want to switch to a new service or remove elements that could be slowing it down.
4. Track everything
Link in bio pages these days come with tracking. You should take advantage of this to see what people are clicking. You might also want to see if these clicks are leading to conversions using a good funnel tracking tool like ClickMagick. Tracking with a heatmap or screen recording tool can also be very beneficial.
5. Test new versions
Tracking the above metrics will only be useful if you do something with them. Therefore, constantly create new versions of your link in bio page based on the data you gather and create new versions that will generate more clicks and sales. If your link in bio tool allows it, you should create two or more versions and A/B split test them.
Now go create your link in bio
These are just a few creative ways to use the link in bio. I recommend that you make a note of these and also visit the accounts of some popular Instagram influencers and businesses you like. You will notice that many of them use bio links in their own unique ways. You can use these as inspiration and create something similar or – brainstorm your own innovative strategy.
