You’ve worked long hours to get your Instagram followers up by another hundred, two hundred, three hundred...using all the hashtags, styling your photos, doing Instagram takeovers with popular accounts, and more. You’re proud of the audience you’ve created there, and rightfully so. There’s only one problem: having “just” an Instagram following isn’t good enough in the long run.

If you haven’t read our post on how to diversify your influence and build a real business, then you might want to check it out before you continue with this post, since we’ll be building on the steps in that post. But if you’ve already got your website and email list set up, keep on reading!

Instead of focusing just on growing your Instagram audience, your focus should be two-fold:

1. Getting your followers back to your online home-base and signing up for updates, usually via email, so that you own the data (we have tips on how to set that up in this post)
2. Getting your followers to take action (whether that’s watching your reviews, buying your products or your affiliate products, participating in a giveaway, etc.), instead of just looking at the picture on Instagram, potentially “liking” it, and continuing to scroll

Since our previous post covers the first piece, let’s dig into ways to get your audience to take action:

Technique 1: Make teasers for your other content

Let’s say you upload a review to your YouTube channel and post it on your site. You can snap a picture of the product you’re reviewing and post it to Instagram, or you can create a quick teaser video for the review, that hits on a few things they’ll get from watching it. (If you need some apps to help you trim your videos down to Instagram size, head over to this post.)

In your teaser, you’ll want to focus on the benefits for watching the full review (or tutorial, or reading the full post). A lot of people try to persuade people by giving them the features of taking a particular action.

For example, you’d use wording like, “Watch my tutorial to learn how to create flawless skin in five minutes,” instead of “Watch my tutorial, which includes these products.” It’s worth including (and tagging!) the products and companies in the description, but Instagram videos are only a minute long — and most people probably won’t stick around for the full minute as they scroll through their feed. In other words, you need to make that teaser-time count by focusing on the benefits.

Technique 2: Utilize your profile link

You probably already know this, but at the moment, your profile link is the only “clickable” link you can add on Instagram. Because of that, you should be updating it periodically. Ideally, it will always have a link to your latest post that you’re promoting or a landing page created specifically for Instagram followers.

Why would your profile direct followers to a landing page, rather than the homepage of your website? When people land on your website, they have many different options of what they can do, but you only want them to do one or two things, like buy your product, or sign up for your email list.

The solution is to create a page where those are the only things they can do. No sidebars, no distracting menus at the top — just some text that welcomes them to your site from Instagram and prompts them to sign up for your newsletter. After the email signup form, you can have a list of your most popular posts or videos, or links to your products. You’ll get much better results than simply sending followers to yoursite.com.

Technique 3: Keep your links short

It’s not uncommon for people to put the link to a blog post or video in the description for an Instagram photo or video. The problem comes up when they’re using links like youtube.com/video/long-video-link or yoursite.com/long-url-name-2016. If you’re expecting people to manually type a link in, or try to copy-and-paste (which we all know can be tricky on a touchscreen!), you want the link as short as possible, so that there’s less room for error.

This is an easy fix, though, with several solutions:

• You can use a free URL shortener like bit.ly to create custom links (bit.ly/bbreview, for example)
• With most website builders, you can edit the URL of a post or page, to keep it as short as possible
• Or, if you want to go the extra mile, you can create a custom short domain using a tool like Rebrandly

There you have it — three ways you can get your Instagram followers to actually take action (and make more money as a result). To get started today, you can:

1. Look at your upcoming videos or posts and create a benefits-focused Instagram teaser for them
2. Create a simple landing page for your Instagram followers and update your profile link to it
3. Use a URL shortener on your next post

And if you want to keep getting more tips on how to grow your influencer business, make sure to sign up for blog updates!