Instagram Profile Optimization: The Complete Guide for Business Owners

When strangers land on a properly setup Instagram profile, they immediately tap follow, and often jump straight into a funnel. In this episode, Jenna walks through a full Instagram profile optimization, including the ONE place on Instagram you need to pepper in your keywords if you want your business to get found on Google.

You'll learn:

• How to optimize your Instagram profile for business starting with your profile photo
• How to choose your pinned posts on Instagram
• What posts belong in your featured Stories (and some secrets about hers involving hair extensions and raccoons)
• New Instagram features that are sure to waste your time and should definitely be ignored

She also explains the online marketing principle "Limiting the path to purchase" and how it applies to getting your leads from instagram, to booking your services with you, as fast as possible.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: 

Write a lead-attracting Instagram bio that makes you look amazing in seconds, inside 5 Minute Bio: https://parkdale-republic.thrivecart.com/5-minute-bio-product/

Join Magic Marketing Machine: www.magicmarketingmachine.com 

🎉 Get clients from Instagram inside Magic Marketing Machine! www.magicmarketingmachine.com

✨Watch a FREE masterclass called “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

🎉 Get clients from Instagram! Tap here to work with Jenna Harding  inside Magic Marketing Machine!

https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

✨Tap here to watch a FREE masterclass on “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration/

Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/10-sales-calls-new

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

jenna harding (00:00)
Get your phone out, bestie, we're optimizing your Instagram profile.

we're gonna do this for two reasons. One, because you're out there making reels, trying to attract people to you. And when they click your reel, which makes them click your profile and they're deciding if they want to follow you, we need to look good. There are a few things that need to be super clear to this person to turn those views

into new followers. If you're getting a ton of profile views, you're getting a ton of Reels views and people aren't tapping follow, something's missing that makes those people say, yes, this is for me. I want to stick around and see what this person has to say. Two, because we want people to find you and there are things that you can do now that you couldn't really do before so that people discover you because of your Instagram profile. Let's begin starting at the top.

With your photo. I want it to be clear. I want it to see your face. If your photo, like your profile photo right now, is your brand's logo. Friend, sister, girl, let's change that. People cannot connect with a logo like they can with your smile and your eyes. So that's the first thing that we want to do. We've done

Probably hundreds of Instagram audits for our clients inside Magic Marketing Machine. We often use a profile audit as like one of our fast action bonuses. So we've given away many of them. And we record like a deep dive of your profile. one of the first things we say to everyone is can we zoom in on your face? I know we don't want you to just look like anybody else, but we do tell everyone to do a punch in on your face. So that we can see your eyes, we can see your smile. Your face is so, so tight.

tiny when someone's looking at your profile on a phone. It's just itty bitty. So if it's a zoom out, we can't even see what is in that picture, right? It's just a mush of colors. So we want to be able to see who you are. I'd love for you to be recognized in public because of your Instagram. Wouldn't that be fun?

Right beside your profile picture is your name line. this should be your name followed by search terms. This is something that people do not take advantage of nearly enough. So when someone is searching for something,

We need to remember that everybody uses search engines differently. You might go straight to Google when you're looking for a cobbler near you or physiotherapist in Niagara Falls or whatever. You may go to ChatGPT and look for that. You may go to Instagram and search for that. There are billions of people out there, and we are all using search.

differently. So while you might say, nobody's searching for me by my occupation on Instagram, you don't know that. That could be. And even if it weren't, the other things can see it too. Like Google can see it too. And that name line is what they're looking at. That's why if you type your name into Google, your Instagram shows up. So instead, we want to put your name and then like a space, maybe a line icon.

And then for instance, mine would be like social media coach. So if somebody Googles social media coach, they're more likely to find me. Anytime you're talking about SEO, we don't need to complicate this. We don't need to become SEO experts. We just need to think about what our clients are Googling and what words they're using to do it. So you probably aren't Googling,

Instagram strategist, right? You could easily call me an Instagram strategist, but that's just not like the colloquial words that someone is probably searching for. They're probably searching for they may be searching for Instagram strategy. but anyway, you want to figure out what your idle clients are typing in, what words they're using when they're thinking. And those are the words we want there. You can only change that name line once every 14 days.

it could even be once every 30 days if you have a new account. So you do wanna make sure you can change your bio a million times, but your name line you need to be a little more careful with. So decide what you want it to be and then change it.

Test your links. While we are optimizing your Instagram profile, go ahead and touch your links and make sure they work. You have no idea how many times I try and work with somebody and the links do not work. If you haven't touched them in a while, go ahead and click them. Make sure you're sending people directly to where you want them to go. you're gonna be tempted to put your home page there, in right there in your Instagram profile.

But if your homepage, like for me, that's jet www.gennaharding.com, that's not gonna make a sale from the homepage, in online marketing, one of the rules is limit the path to purchase. So, my gosh, this is rapid fire. So we wanna basically remove as many clicks as possible think about it this way. If it takes like five clicks to work with you,

click to your Instagram and then a click to your profile page and then a click away from your homepage to your sales page and then a click to the offer that you're thinking about and then another click to the type of payment that you want to use like whether you want a payment plan or pay in full for instance right every one of those clicks you're gonna hemorrhage leads. That's just the way of the internet that's the way it works. you're gonna start with five people and only one of them is gonna make it to the end.

So we want to take away as many clicks as possible. So if right now on Instagram you're promoting an offer and you have a sales page for it on your website, a page on your website dedicated to selling that thing, don't send me to your home page. I know it's pretty, I know you paid a lot of money for it. Send me right to the sales page. So when I see your real talking about it, I can get directly there to the thing that you are talking about.

For the body of your bio, I have an entire mini offer for this that tells you what to put in your bio, how to frame it so that it's interesting to strangers when they see it. We want them to feel immediately reflected in it, right? So we want people who stumble upon your page or find you through your reel or whatever. We want them to read the bio and go, my goodness, that's exactly what I need. This is the person I've been searching for. Part of that is lit.

is putting language in there that speaks to who your idle client is and the results they get. Part of it is adding clout to your bio so you look more legit. So we trust you faster. We have an entire mini offer on the body of your bio. It's called 15 minute bio, I think. Is that what it's called? Yeah. It's called 15 minute bio and it and it costs 15 bucks. You can get it below this episode if you want to know what to write in your bio and a whole bunch of examples of what other business owners have done

That look damn good and are designed to make people want to work with them. Moving down to your featured stories.

Also called stories, highlights. These are all the tiny circles you see across people's pages, right? Underneath that bio information. You see a whole bunch of dots. And what they are are old stories. Stories expire after 24 hours, but you can save your stories and l let them live a longer life by saving them as featured stories. You can have pretty much as many as you want.

You can add new stories to the current featured stories, kind of like put them together like chapters in a book. The thing to notice about those is those are for people who are deep diving you. Those are no longer being served to new people. Instagram isn't gonna show a stranger or a follower or whatever a featured story. So it's similar to your website, right? People are only gonna see those if they actually click to watch those.

And that gives us a major clue on what should be in those stories, right? This is for someone who knows who you are because they've showed up here and clicked the story. So if somebody's like creeping you and trying to decide if they want to work with you, what do they need to see at that moment? A lot of mine are like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of testimonials. They do need a c a tidy up because I've just been like adding testimonials to them for years. So

I I really do need to clean that up. But another one is like start here or hi, nice to meet you, or who I am, or how I can help you, or work with me, or whatever. if someone comes to your page and they know a little bit about you and they're trying to decide if they feel comfortable with you, they might be looking for evidence that you've helped someone like them. They might be looking for examples of your work. What do people need to see? Pop that into your featured stories. You can also use it just to like

Hang on to something that you didn't want to see disappear. Maybe you had a story that was like really popular and you were sad to see it go after 24 hours. Save it. Save it for yourself. I've got a featured story. You could find it if you dig, but it's just like a whole bunch of wonderful moments from a year, probably 2019 or something, like a really long time ago. And one of them is from when I was a bartender and I went to work with a whole bunch of extensions in my hair. And

halfway through the night I couldn't bear to have these extensions clipped in. So I went into the pantry and I unclipped all the extensions and just threw them down like on a freezer, very unsanitary. And I took a little picture of it with and wrote like number one employee because it was just so gross and weird. And I thought that was hilarious. So I posted on Instagram every now and then I go back and watch it.

I think it's fun. I was also super plagued by raccoons when I lived in Toronto. So you can see a lot of content if you dig where I was just like battling these raccoons that lived on my porch and were not afraid of me because they were little pups. I like I lived there when they were born, so they weren't scared of me at all. And try as I might, I could not get them to leave. And you're like, why would you want them to leave? They're so sweet. Yes, but they poo everywhere. They poo literally everywhere.

One time also they found my I could make an entire I could make ten episodes of my my fight with raccoons. I had my hide a key on my porch tied under a chair, like my emergency key, but it's shiny, right? And they love shiny things. So they untied it and took it out and put it down right down in the middle of my door jam. So I literally walked up and there's my key in Toronto, in Parkdale, like not the nicest area, and my key is sitting down right in front of my door, as if to say,

Come on in.

And I mean, who am I to stop them from having friends over? It was their house too.

Moving down the page, you've got pinned posts. you can use your pinned post for whatever you want. There's no rule. But typically what people do is one that's get to know me.

One that sells something or sells a freebie, and one that's like whatever most recently went viral or you got the most views on because you want when people to show up to your page for them to see like a time you were really successful. And I just saw someone post on Instagram, don't post this, don't pin these posts, don't do this anymore. Get to know me selling something, something with high views. This is not what you should be doing. And you know what that is?

Blossum. I don't know who this person was. I didn't even clock their name, but what they're doing is they're taking something everybody is doing that everybody believes is right and they're zagging while you zig. So you think you're doing something wrong, so you listen to them instead. If what you want to have pinned is a get to know you post, something that sells something and something went viral, I think that's freaking fine. All right. I think that's fine. Because again, what does someone need to see when they show up here for the first time?

I often have my pinned posts be like something that teaches my methodology, something that prompts you to get a freebie or a lead magnet, and then something that sells you a low ticket offer right away.

Why would I wait if I could get you into a funnel right now and get you like consuming more of my content right now? You know, it's it's totally up to you. But again, I want you to think about what does somebody need to see? For your pinned post, you can have three pinned posts on your profile and then different pinned posts on your reels tab. And stay with me here. If somebody sees one of your reels in their feed and they click your page from the reels they are brought directly to your reels tab. So if you have

Posts pinned on your like main page, they're not actually seeing those. They're only seeing the top three reels you have pinned. All right. You can have the same posts pinned on both pages. I don't care. It's up to you. You could have something way old. You could have something way new. You could take listening to this episode as a reminder to go update them. You can't do it wrong. There's no real doing it wrong. Just think about if I'm scrolling your reels and I come across you and I'm like, hey.

Katrina seems nice. what other stuff does she post about? I wanna know. And then we look at it and then I go, look at these other funny things that she said. look at these other super helpful posts. she has a f a lead magnet that gives me an answer that I've been searching for. I'm immediately gonna sign up for that. You know what I mean?

You can now reorganize your grid on Instagram, not the Reels tab, just the main page. Should you? I don't know, man. My stance on it. And listen, if you're new here, I'm an expert. I I help business owners make money from Instagram. And when I say stuff like, I don't know, it's because I mean like it's not a revenue generating activity. And I would prefer you spend your time.

making new posts and getting those new posts out there. But I also know that sometimes we get really hung up on things like the aesthetic of our grid. So if it's keeping you from posting on Instagram because you hate the way it looks, sure, reorganize it. If you're beating yourself up because your last few posts got low views, sure, reorganize it and put something with high views up at the top.

If that's gonna help you make more content and do those revenue generating activities, like making a sales post, like getting into your DMs and converting somebody, like showing up on your stories and pitching your offer, the things that make you money, go ahead and do it if it's gonna help you. covers on your posts, that's a thing of the past. That's honestly a time wasted activity. Going back and archiving all of your old content from when you had a different business or a different last name, that's all just time wasted.

It's not worth it for the one person who's gonna bother to scroll back or the one person that cares about your covers being pretty. I promise you, even if you sell something high ticket, even if you sell something like photography that's highly aesthetic, even if your whole business is brand strategy, I will die on this hill. I don't care if your Instagram is aesthetic, if when by looking at your content, I trust you, you help me, and I believe you can get me where I want to go.

Said from the girl in her gym clothes with a messy bun on her head who made fifteen thousand dollars last week.

This was super rapid fire. you might need to listen again with a notebook. I probably should have told you to grab a notebook at the beginning. You don't need to fix all of this stuff at once, right? Change a couple things here and there. If you want to.

Rewrite your bio, go ahead and get five minute bio. that's what it's called. It's called five minute bio. Go ahead and get five minute bio from the show notes. Join Magic Marketing Machine. It's the very first thing we do with you is make sure your bio is super strong and reflects who you are and makes you look amazing.

At the end of the day, optimizing your Instagram profile is one thing that you can do to attract more people and make it so that when people find you,

They stick around, fall in love with you, and later buy from you. That's the name of the game. I'll see you next week.