Transcription
So I make a lot of money with Instagram stories, and what I want to do in this video is show you how to use Instagram stories for business. So how can you make a bunch of money with stories?
In case you don't know me, my name is Maria Went. I've made over $6 million in the last four years leveraging Instagram a lot and also selling courses, but I do that on Instagram. So, uh, Instagram is like my main thing that sells my courses. So um, what I want to do is show you how I use Instagram stories for my business and what you can do too. So this is going to be very practical, um, and I'm literally just going to show you how I do it.
The first thing that I want you to know is that you should be pitching daily in your stories, but pitching subtly. SO pitching subtly is not "buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, here's a link to buy my stuff." No, that's obviously annoying, and you know better than that, right? What you're actually going to do is start pitching subtly. So I'm going to go to—what I can do is I can go to my archive, and then I can see all my stories, and you can kind of see an example of um, some pitches that I do. So um, so this is a great example of one. Okay, so this is a subtle pitch. Okay, this is linking to a checkout page. I'm just going to pause it so you can see it. Um, this is a real example of my journey as an entrepreneur. So I made $63 in my first year all the way down to $3.6 million in the last year, so this year, um, and then you can see here um, the text on the bottom which says, "Notice that light bulb where I jump from 300K to a million. I had a massive light bulb moment." So I'm just teaching, right? This is essentially a teaching um, it's a teaching story, but then this light bulb thing here is going to go to an automation. So I'm going to talk about automations in step two. You got to leverage automations. I will talk about that in a minute, but I just want to show a couple examples of this so you can get the hang of it.
So here's another example, picture of me and my daughter at this beautiful Northern California beach. Little bit of teaching, pitch at the bottom, and that little pitch goes to a free YouTube video. And then, then um, you can see here another example. So this is actually like one of three, so you can do it this way too. So essentially I'm teaching, and at the very end is a keyword um, that pitches, but it's it's subtle, right? I'll give you an example of a less than subtle pitch so you can see the difference. This is a less than subtle pitch. I'm literally saying, "Hey, this is a course you should come join," right, with some testimonials. That would be a more direct pitch when you're just um, or like here's a direct pitch. So you can see here, "Join our coaching group." That's a direct pitch. The cool thing is, right, like these posts tend to do really well. You can't see, but they're like—I get like a bunch because people are replying; it creates a lot of engagement. So I really, really like these kinds.
So the first thing that you need to know if you're going to start using Instagram stories for your business is you need to be pitching daily, but subtly, where you're giving some value, and then at the end there's a little keyword, and you're going to leverage that automation. Now I want to show you—um, I just want to teach you a little bit about what what I mean by leveraging automation. So we'll go back to this example, and when they reply with the word "light bulb," I have an automation that I have set up to send a link to the one of my courses on like one of my courses, but I want to show you how I do it, okay, um, because it's done really intentionally. So we're going to leverage automations, but we're not going to be like over the top about it. So let me just turn this off because I'm going to share my screen. I'm going to do some fancy fancy stuff here. Okay, so we're going to share my screen. There we go. It's my other YouTube video. I'm batching them out today. I've got pizza on the way, so I'm trying to hurry. Um, let me just put this and do not disturb. God knows what could come through. Okay, so we're going to go to ManyChat. That's what I use. I highly recommend ManyChat. I have an entire course on leveraging automation. So what I'm going to show you is like one billionth of all the cool things you can do with ManyChat, all the cool things I have done. So I will link to my automation course down below, but let me just—so so they were going to search for the word "light bulb," right? They were supposed to reply "light bulb." So when they reply "light bulb" to my story, they get this big block of text. Okay, this is teaching them. So I was teaching, and then I'm teaching even more, right? So I'm—it's—when I say pitch daily but subtly, it's pretty subtle, right? So it's: here's a very valuable piece of information; reply with this keyword to get even more valuable information; and at the very end, then I pitch, right? And that's the link to my course. This is the course that I have where I teach how I sell all this load ticket stuff, um, basically how I set this up. So I'm showing you part of what's in this course, but it's just the Instagram Stories part. There's also a whole bunch of stuff you can do with Instagram Reels, a whole bunch of stuff you can do with Instagram carousels, um, so um, that is essentially what it looks like. If we go back, I'll pull up—let me just do that really quickly because I want you to see—if we pull up—show my iPhone. Okay, so if we go back here, just so it's visually not so cluttered. Okay, so if I go back here and we pull up a couple other stories, I just want to show you. So let's go to the word "leverage," right? So if we go to the word "leverage"—just going to search the word "leverage"—spell—I want you to see what this one looks like. Okay, so this is what they would get. They reply "leverage," and then um, this is the old one, so you can kind of see here this is what it looked like. We're rebuilding them and making them a little bit more um, variety just because I have so much traffic coming through, but here's the old one. It's very simple. Um, so this one you can see here on the um, left-hand side with my story up, you can see they reply "leverage," and then when they click it, it's a link to a free resource, right? So the—if you look on the right-hand side, it says, "I'm going to give you this for free." They reply "leverage," and then they get the resource for free. Again, the automa—stuff can feel very overwhelming. I totally get that, which is why I made a course on how you can leverage automations, how you can set all of this up. You can literally—the course that I created on this is literally just step by step. So I will link to that at the bottom. Um, you can also just Google it, like if you want to figure it out all by yourself, but if you do buy my course, um, I've done all of it for you, so you can literally just like copy and paste every um, automation that I've built. I've got coupon automations, I've got just all kinds of stuff, so I would check it out if that's something you're interested in doing, but you don't have to at all. You can totally do this by yourself if you want to.
Okay, um, let me just—what I want to do now is just show you a couple more examples of how you can do subtle pitches um, with even just like your face, so like Talking Heads. So let me see if I can find it. This is an example of—a lot of you guys know I have a Facebook coaching group where I answer your questions every single day. That's a hard pitch; that's not a subtle pitch. You can do this too in your Instagram stories, but what I want to show you is the more subtle pitch because people tend to like those better. So this one here: "Good morning, happy Hump Day. Cannot believe it's already Wednesday. Listen, I have figured out what works super well for captions. I want to teach you. Just reply 'caption' to the story, and I'm going to send you the whole—like it's a little tutorial. Long captions don't work anymore. Long story short, long captions don't work anymore." So then when I go—if we go here and we go to "caption," you can see here it's a very long testimonial. This works so well. I'm going to stop sharing my screen here and just flip back to my face and then turn off the little circle one um, because I want to just give you a couple more pointers, um, but that is essentially it. You can see here, as you look through how I'm using Instagram stories for my business, is just to pitch subtly every single day, and you can reuse stuff you've already taught. Like you've already taught a bunch of stuff; you don't need to recreate this from scratch. Think about the stuff you are already teaching. You've already taught; you've already typed and put it on your story, and then the formula is basically this, okay? Story that teaches, keyword, like little tutorial, and then at the very bottom—and I'll show you again just to make sure you really got this part because I don't want you to miss this part—at the very bottom of these, above all else, this is where I pitch. There's this tutorial, and then at the very bottom is where I pitch, and that always goes to my checkout page. So um, I would say 95% of the time this goes to my checkout page, and so I'm giving double value, right? Two things of value, and then I say, "Hey, by the way, like if you have 100 Instagram followers or more, you should be making $50 per day with your Instagram account. If you're not, that's a problem, and I'll show you how to fix that problem with my passive income with Instagram course." It's one of my most popular courses. You may already have it; a lot of people do. Um, and so that—that is what—I don't want to pull up the FaceTime here—that is how I use Instagram stories for my business: daily pitches every single day that go to keywords. And by the way, you can reuse keywords after a certain amount of time. So like, let's say it's been four months, three months, reuse the same content, put the same content on your stories. I do it all the time, and nobody ever notices. Um, that's what I do.
So if you need help with a couple of different things, I have some resources for you to help you. Okay, first thing I have is if you are worried about creating those stories, I created viral content templates. So I took my best stories, like the ones you saw on there, but I collected the very best ones, the ones that got tens of thousands of views, um, and I put them all together and I created template tutorial, so you can just use those. So if you want to check out my viral content templates, you can do so. I'll put a link in the description. Other resource that I have for you is my automation course, where I teach you the automation part. So if the first part teaches you the Instagram Story part, the second part teaches you the automation part, so how to set it all up. And if you buy my my course, you can literally just copy—literally, there's a setting in ManyChat where you can duplicate the flow, and it will be using the things I've already built, so you won't have to build any automations at all, which can be really, really nice and will save you a lot of time. So those are the two resources I'm going to link down below. Again, you can absolutely Google it and figure it out. I don't want you to think you have to. You have what you need to start making money from your Instagram stories, which is understanding that first I'm going to teach, so I'm going to teach a tip; second, I'm going to have them reply a specific keyword; that keyword is going to teach them more things, right? So you saw there's always that longer chunk, and then I'm going to pitch at the very end, right? I'm going to pitch a link to my course, a link to my offer, a link to my service, whatever it is I'm selling at the bottom of that second one. That formula is tested and true and works so well for me. Um, if you want to get the resource, you totally can; they're optional though. I don't want you to feel like you don't have what you need. You have everything you need in order to start making money from your Instagram stories. So that is how I would use Instagram stories for my business. It's literally how I use Instagram stories for my business. Case again, and we're just meeting—my name is Maria Went. I've made over $6 million in big part thanks to Instagram, and I just like showing women how to make money. So hopefully I'll see you in the next video. Be sure to subscribe. I got a lot of good stuff on here about making money, and I'll see you in the next one.