How to Drive Targeted Traffic from Instagram to Your Email List

Imagine you spent over £1,200 on Facebook marketing and the product didn't convert as well as you had wanted and you nearly broke even.

Nearly breaking even is a loss. You don't want to spend money on paid advertising if it's not working.

That's what happened to me and this blog is how I stopped spending money to test Facebook conversions and went all in on time to test free traffic from Instagram to build my email list.

I'm going to cover all the free software I use while it's limited and that's ok. As once you start seeing results with free traffic you can switch to paid traffic to massively increase conversions.

Step 1 - Which HashTags to use?

There's no need to get creative with hashtags. Do a search for your niche hashtag and look for people who have many likes and many comments. Go through the comments to make sure many of them are not automated and is in fact real people which let you know that channel and hashtag has real interest.

Search for your main interest hashtag e.g.

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<img class="size-full wp-image-1117 alignnone" src="https://sites.google.com/a/davidarm.com/davidarm/_/rsrc/1545983514065/home/hashtag-email-markeing.jpg" alt="hashtag email markeing" />
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Pick one of the many posts that get returned and go look at there hashtags.

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<img class="size-full wp-image-1117 alignnone" src="https://sites.google.com/a/davidarm.com/davidarm/_/rsrc/1545983537582/home/to-win-it.jpg" alt="Instagram love and comments" />
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Once you click on the picture to see the description, you see all the hashtags that got views. Also the person will have a lot of followers. This technique gets me lots of free visitors to my Instagram profile each week. Look at the below hashtags for the above image:-

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<img class="size-full wp-image-1117 alignnone" src="https://sites.google.com/a/davidarm.com/davidarm/home/hashtags-list.jpg" alt="Instagram hashtags" />
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You want to find 3 sets of hashtags where the images have over 100 likes and 10 comments.

At this point you want to copy those three sets of hashtags onto a page separating by several returns.

the reason for several returns is, you are going to write an advert for Instagram hashtag group. This will give you three post a day.

More on this later when I cover posting with a free scheduler.

Best Way To Find Ad Content

When you are looking for interesting content I find the best way is to use a free keyword tool that you install into Chrome as a plug-in and that's called “keyword anywhere”.

You type in your keywords into Google and it shows you related keywords that you pick which best suits the content you want to post e.g.

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<img class="size-full wp-image-1117 alignnone" src="https://sites.google.com/a/davidarm.com/davidarm/_/rsrc/1545983533592/home/related-keywords.jpg" alt="related keywords Keywords Everywhere" />
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Now you have the best keyword phrases, paste them into Google and do a search. You are looking for articles or titles within the first ten or twenty you are URL’s.

You are looking for titles to give you ideas to write a new Instagram post around for example in the post below you could take 6 tips for writing an awesome business email as your Instagram text then in the Instagram description write your own content.

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<img class="size-full wp-image-1117 alignnone" src="https://sites.google.com/a/davidarm.com/davidarm/_/rsrc/1545983506036/home/6-tips-for-writing.jpg" alt="6 tips for writing business email" />
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Call To action To Move Visitors From Your Image To Your Profile

The goal with Instagram is to get people to click on your Instagram image then jump across to your profile and then from your profile to your landing page. So currently we are at your image and you want to get as many people to click on the image to see your profile.

The best way I found of doing this was to put a call to action at the bottom of every image. I posted “Free Download in my Profile” and this boosted my click through rate from images to my profile from virtually nothing to 202 profile visits from Dec-11 to Dec-1, that’s only 7 days.

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<img class="size-full wp-image-1117 alignnone" src="https://sites.google.com/a/davidarm.com/davidarm/_/rsrc/1545983502452/home/1-week-stats.jpg" alt="1 week Instagram stats" />
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You can test different messages to see what works best for you.

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<img class="size-full wp-image-1117 alignnone" src="https://sites.google.com/a/davidarm.com/davidarm/_/rsrc/1545983521936/home/insta-message-test.jpg" alt="Instagram post test" />
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If you don’t have any photo software, use Canva.com, it’s free, easy to use and has a phone app.

Link Your Instagram Profile To Your Landing Page

Put a free download into your Instagram profile to get click throughs, I’m still testing my click through rate and want to show you what I got in 7 days:-

To put this into perspective, for the 202 images that were clicked bringing visitors through to my profile, if I used paid Facebook adverts, I would be paying around $3 a click, that times 202 clicks would have cost me $606 for 5 email signups, in a week.

So, yes, I need to keep tweaking my profile offer to improve email signups, can you see how powerful this is?

If your trying to build a customer base with no budget, thats 20 leads a month for free.

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<img class="size-full wp-image-1117 alignnone" src="https://sites.google.com/a/davidarm.com/davidarm/_/rsrc/1545983529742/home/profile-text.jpg" alt="Instagram profile text" />
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That being said, take a look at my subscriber growth. If you were going to run a paid campaign to a bigger boost in email signups, by using free traffic and testing different text, you can see by looking at the signup conversion chart below I have a much better chance of converting paid ads to sign-up’s:

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<img class="size-full wp-image-1117 alignnone" src="https://sites.google.com/a/davidarm.com/davidarm/_/rsrc/1545983509907/home/groath-chart.jpg" alt="social traffic growth chart" />
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Keep in mind these are still cold leads, you need to convert them to warm leads before you make sales.

While in this post i'm just talking about Instagram free traffic, I’m also generating free traffic from Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest, but that will be more blogs covering one free traffic source at a time.

The key takeaway her is that once you get your free traffic converting at a rate you are happy with, you can start paid advertising to drive traffic knowing you will get an instant boost on conversions.

Word of warning. If you add paid traffic, make sure your conversions get your ad cost back. If not on the lead in offer, at least on the upsale. If this makes no sense at the moment, just stick to free traffic.

The Best Free Give Away You Can Offer

While I see other people offer:-

I like to offer handouts written in Google docs then publish them in the Google doc, DO NOT share them as a shared Google doc has a limit of 100 views then stops for 12 hours, whereas a published Google doc has unlimited views.

To publish a Google Doc. Go to File > Publish to the web…

The link you get for the published doc messes up the format, you need to paste the link into https://gdoc.pub/ which generates a new URL for you to share as a well formatted handout which updates automatically when you update your Google doc. Here’s what I mean.

If I publish this Google Doc, the format messes ups e.g.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQVyLDopdvVO0d_5M3Z0WLwG7fqV_eHgEE4w786zL5WwLgpfXqMLSo41uB5Tsg-Xdye7WLqxmTpBVyu/pub 

When I run the above URL through https://gdoc.pub/ I get the below formatted URL:-

https://gdoc.pub/doc/e/2PACX-1vQVyLDopdvVO0d_5M3Z0WLwG7fqV_eHgEE4w786zL5WwLgpfXqMLSo41uB5Tsg-Xdye7WLqxmTpBVyu# 

Which has the same formatting as your Google doc, super quick and great for handouts.  

Now You Have Cold Email Leads - Time To Make Them Customers

Taking a new email signup to a sale is a whole guide on it’s own and looking around the internet you will see everyone has their own ideas on the best process.

End of the day it all boils down to three things:-

  1. Does your product or service save them time or money?
  2. Does your reader trust you?
  3. Can your reader afford the cost?

If yes to all three, enjoy many sales. If no to any of these, you have work to do.

The reason for not making sales is your lead does not see you as the best go to person for the product or service you offer.

As I don’t know you, or your level of experience, the best way to sell to your list is to talk about real situations in the form of a story.

We have been telling stories to keep our families safe in fun ways from caveman times to modern times from the Green Cross Code to Stranger Danger etc.

If your not sure how best to structure your story, I would recommend this book from Amazon for a couple of reasons:-

The book is:- Building a StoryBrand - https://amzn.to/2GzHZHf and the reason I give a tip on each instagram post to give you value and start building trust from the get-go.

Conclusion & Well Done

Well done sticking to the end, I have covered allot in this post and want to help you even more in my Facebook group where you can ask questions and talk to others to share and learn from everyone's experiences for free. Click here to join: Link To Facebook Group