Today’s video is actually an entire lesson from my full “Instagram for makers: from a to sales” course, so if you want to see how it looks, I highly encourage you to watch it.
I’m going to walk you step-by-step in creating your Instagram bio and share examples and inspiration of makers who are doing it right along the way.
Before we jump in, I just want to let you know that you’ll read things like “you-centric”, “brand-centric” and “community-centric” in this lesson. These are concepts that I defined in a previous lesson of the course when I help you pick a strategic archetype for your handmade shop’s Instagram account. But don’t worry about it, you will still get a ton of value from this blog post, even without having done this previous exercise. So without further ado, let’s go and craft your perfect Instagram bio!
THIS FREE PLANNER WILL HELP YOU CREATE A SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN FOR YOUR HANDMADE SHOP. KNOW WHAT TO POST, WHEN TO POST IT, AND WHAT TOOLS TO USE!
Your Instagram bio is your Instagram business card. It helps people who visit your profile understand what it’s about, what they can and should expect from it, and it allows you to have a clickable link (the only clickable link that you have).
Let’s start by defining what the profile bio really is. This is really what a profile page looks like and so the bio is kind of like this pink block at the top here:
Instagram highlights are covered in another lesson, so we’re going to focus exclusively on this part of your profile bio instead:
Your Instagram bio is made up of:
Let’s take it step by step. First, your profile picture. It’s just a small circle image. You basically have two options here so it’s pretty straightforward. You can use either a picture of yourself (a portrait) so it’s more personal or you may use your logo if you want to have an account that reflects your brand, your business or a community more.
If you decide that you want to have your portrait as the profile picture for your account, then make sure that it’s not a picture of your full body and that you’re not too far away because it’s so tiny people won’t be able to see and recognize you.
The opposite is also true – you don’t want to be too zoomed into your face. Ideally, you want to have something that looks like those three pictures:
If you pick option two and you want to use a logo instead, maybe because your brand archetype is brand-centric or community-centric, then make sure that there is no small text on that small picture, again, because it is so small that it’s not going to look too good. Keep it simple.
You can use your brand mark instead of your logo if your main logo doesn’t work. For example, for Tizzit (I actually use my profile picture for Tizzit) my main logo is rectangular, so wouldn’t really work in a square or a circle, and so I would use my brand mark for that, which is just a stamped letter T (for Tizzit). Here are some examples of what it could look like:
Next, let’s talk about your username and your name.
Your username and your name are the only two searchable fields in your profile, meaning that you have to think of what people would search to find you on the platform and make sure that it is being used for your name and your username.
Your username is your handle, it is your @ on the platform. It usually is your shop or your brand’s name. It could also be your name if you are a personal brand. Think of it as your main title. You want to keep it simple, easy to read, easy to type and easy to remember.
You can use punctuation to help, but you can’t use your URL – that’s actually in the terms of use of Instagram. For example, I had @tizzit.co as my username for a while, but I’ve changed that to @tizzitco (without the dot) because my actual URL is tizzit.co and that’s against Instagram’s terms of use. So if you don’t want to have your account suspended don’t put as your username @myshop.com because that isn’t tolerated.
Your name needs to complement your username. You can think of it as your subtitle or your subheading. You want to think of search optimization here again. In the first module of the course, we talked about your Instagram sales funnel and being discoverable, so I highly recommend checking the whole course out as it will help.
Anyway, your username and your name are your two only options (in your bio – not talking about Instagram hashtags here) for being discovered. Even the text that’s going to be in that little paragraph below your username and name won’t be searchable, so these two fields are very important.
So beyond what you’ve already used for your username, what do you want to be found for? It could be your name or it could be a brief keyword packed description of what your account is about. Let’s look at a few examples together:
This first one is @bubbahboutique. That’s obviously the shop’s name, the brand’s name. I’ll actually make a little side note here that the logo is a little bit too small and that we can’t really see what is written there, so that’s something that I would change, but going back on topic: username and name.
Bubbah boutique is the shop’s name and the name is used as a way of describing what the shop is about and also for being found for terms like “handmade”, “luxe”, “baby” and “boutique”.
The second example is @hearthandtableco. That’s the name of the Etsy shop as well, so it’s the brand’s name, but because she’s probably thought that people know her by her name too and they might be searching for it, she’s put in the name: Emily Latham.
The last example is @natanazarian. Because she’s a personal brand and it is very much a you-centric account, she has used an actual personal name for both for her username and her name.
Let’s look at your bio next, so that little paragraph below your username and your name that is 150 characters maximum. It’s small and it needs to have two parts. The first one is a description of your account and the second part is your call to action.
Let’s look at the first part: description.
There are three description styles:
What do I mean by that? Well, a description that’s got an introduction style sounds like this:
These are descriptions that are best suited when you have a you-centric account and you are a personal brand.
A rally description on the other end is a better fit if you have the community-centric account, like Rising Tide Society:
The next example is House Plant community:
A good example is also Like-minded bitches drinking wine:
It’s more about rallying people together and what makes you a community. It’s a better fit if you are a community-centric account.
Finally, we have the statement style description, which is better suited if you are a brand-centric account. So for example, Madewell says:
Bannor toys says:
Mossery says:
These are more facts and statements about what the mission behind the brand is, what they do and what the values are.
When it comes to deciding what kind of description you’re going to have, think back to your archetype because it needs to make sense with your archetype (and again, this is something we cover in another lesson of the “Instagram for maker’s: from a to sales” course). What type of account do you have and how do you need to introduce it to people who’ve never heard of you before? It needs to clearly explain what the account or the shop is about and it needs to make potential followers understand what they’ll get by following your account.
Whatever you do, please don’t overthink it. You can change this really easily. If you want, you can change it every day. I don’t recommend that, but you will probably change it regularly as you find better ways to express who you are and what your account is about in under 150 characters. So don’t overthink it, you can change it. Just pick one and move on for now.
My last tip is about how it looks: make it more readable by using line breaks and emojis. That’s really important.
The second part of your bio paragraph is your call to action, and that’s the last sentence, the last line of your bio. It should be dedicated to a call to action. It’s located just above your only clickable link, your link in bio, so we need to use it to encourage people to click that link in bio. It can be generic or it can be timely.
Remember that again, this is something that you can change as often as you want to. You can also use emojis to emphasize the link below visually, like arrows pointing down. That’s something that I would recommend too.
Let’s look at a few examples of what this could be. Depending on what people would get if they click the link in your bio, you might want to say something like this:
The two last ones are more timely and the four first examples are more kind of generic. This will, of course, depend on what the actual link in your bio is going to be and where it’s going to take people, so let’s talk about that next.
The link in your bio is the only link that people can click on your account that you can customize so you can take them anywhere you’d like (again, not talking about the Instagram Stories here). It’s a crucial step in your Instagram sales system.
There are lots of possible options here and you might want a different link every time you post. If you post a picture of your latest product collection, you might want the link in your bio to be taking people to that product collection. If you post a picture with a caption that talks about your latest post, where you’re talking about your latest pattern that you’re selling – maybe you want the link in your bio to take people to that exact pattern.
The only problem with this approach is that we have only one link so we can’t have something too broad, like the general homepage of your shop, and we can’t have something too specific, like one product, because you will need to change it every time you post and that’s not practical.
Luckily, there’s a solution. Here are my two recommended options: first is to use that link to take people to a landing page (I’ll explain in a second what that is). That’s probably what 98% of you are going to do. The second option is to link to a clickable version of your feed.
Let’s look at option one, the landing page, first.
A landing page is a page that you create just for Instagram to direct users to where they want to go. Typically it offers a choice of several links, so when someone clicks on that landing page, there’s a selection of links that they can click on. To build it, you can either use your website builder and create a really simple page on it just for Instagram, or you can use a tool like Linktree, Campsite or Milkshake (you can also find them all in the workbook for this course).
Let’s look at a few examples:
The first one on the left here is mine, and that’s something that I’ve built with my website builder. I didn’t use a tool for this, it’s a page on my website that you can access if you go to tizzit.co/Instagram. It’s not on my website in my menu or my navigation bar. It’s kind of hidden and I just use it on Instagram so that people can find the links that I refer to in my posts most often.
The two pictures on the right are from Campsite and Linktree which are tools that help you build those landing pages really easily so that you can offer from this one link in bio a couple of different links once people click on it.
The pros of using a landing page are that it allows you to direct people toward different links via the one link in your bio. It’s highly customizable because you can decide which links you want to have on that landing page and it’s really easy to create and to change as needed.
The only problem with it though is that it’s not great for linking to a specific product listing or to a very specific article on your blog because you don’t want to have hundreds of links on that landing page – it becomes too overwhelming. Generally what you would want to do is to add a link to your blog, homepage, product category or to your shop, but not necessarily to specific product listing.
Let’s look at the second option for that link next, which was using an app that allows you to turn the link in bio to a clickable version of your feed. What does that even mean? Well, there are apps and tools out there that allow you to recreate a version of your Instagram feed where each image is clickable.
The best-known tool for this is called Linkin.bio by Later. Here’s what it does:
This is an account called @meundies and if you see the link in bio, it says linkin.bio/meundies. If you click on it, it will open a page that looks exactly like the feed (on the right). You might think that you’re still on this Instagram account, but you’re not. You are on a separate page that just looks exactly like the feed.
What’s great here is that this time when they click on an image on the picture on the right, they are being redirected to a link of your choosing. That’s a great option if you post a lot of product images because each image can then be linked to that one specific product listing.
It’s also great if you want to refer to a specific video or a specific blog post, but it’s not so great for a few reasons. The first one is that usually those tools are paid. The second one is that Instagram is actually coming up with a feature called the shoppable feed, which I’m diving into in the next lesson of the “Instagram from makers: from a-to-sales”, that may make this option not so useful after all. The last thing that I think isn’t too great with that option is that when people click on the link in your bio and this page opens that looks exactly like the feed, they have to remember what picture they were looking at to find the link that they want to click. It makes it not necessarily super user-friendly in my opinion.
We’ve worked through a lot of steps together, but it’s time to put it all together so that you can build your perfect Instagram profile bio. In the workbook accompanying this course, I’m sharing with you activities to help you craft your perfect Instagram bio, and I highly recommend you check it out and do those activities.
When you join the full “Instagram for makers: from a to sales course”, you’ll also learn a ton more strategies, like:
Make sure to check out the course. Au revoir!
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