After a couple of days, we have more than 80 followers. Our shop’s Instagram account no longer looks like an empty just-created one. I think we will close the 100-followers line today after some routine following. And all that without any hashtags or severe promotion activities or business development. It seems that Instagram is an excellent platform with a lot of people who will follow you if the content is good and visually appealing. My fiancee, Kate, made it very attractive, I didn’t realize how good all this will look. Maybe we’ll be able to get first 1000 followers much sooner than I thought. And then 1000.

Lots of people visit your profile

I was analyzing profiles of influencers in our niche and noticed that bio plays an essential part in overall profile perception. People share personal bits about themselves. They add links to allow followers to get more information and tell the reason behind creating the channel. Avatar and bio are two critical steps to connect with followers on the emotional level as a brand. Kate created a simple avatar with hand-written letters, and I’ve added a bio telling that we’re a couple of creatives who want to inspire others. I think this will be the story behind the shop and you need one. The worst thing that can be done is a shop without a personal touch and information on who’s behind the screen and why they are selling.

A lot of people are visiting Instagram profile every day. We got more than 60 new followers yesterday, that means 60 people were able to learn about us, the store and the brand. I think this number increases tremendously over time, plus I’m going to do a bit of paid advertising and those people will be curious to check who’s posting those beautiful images and why. We must capitalize on that.

Laning page for pre-launch mailing list

Instagram allows you to add a website link in bio. There are a bit more options for business accounts, but they still are allowed to add only one link. Some users use pinned stories as a menu and add links inside stories. We’ll try that too a bit later, but for now, one link should be sufficient. Since the store is still under construction and it is password protected there’s nowhere to link yet. I was thinking about creating some portfolio but then realized that the Instagram account is that portfolio. Even my creative friends usually use it to showcase their work though there are certain limits.

It would be nice to convert Instagram followers so that there will be two-way communication. After some thought, I realized that best way to convert them would be to create a pre-launch mailing list for followers to subscribe too. After placing a link, everyone who’s interested would be able to single-page website, learn about the upcoming launch and story behind the shop. If they are interested, they will subscribe to the list, and we’ll be able to announce the launch to them once the shop is ready.

A pre-launch mailing list is a great way to establish pull-type of communication early on. Instagram is typically a push-type — you create a post, and then your followers engaged. Of course, this works only if they are free and if they see your post in the feed, which is not guaranteed with the current Instagram feed algorithm. A mailing list is different. If an email arrives in the mailbox, there’s a big chance that the user will read it. If you’re not spamming and your content is relevant to users, they will read it and act on it at some point.

It took only an hour to create the landing page

There are a ton of landing page generators out there, both free and paid ones. I tried to create a landing page on MailChimp first because after all, I want people to subscribe to the mailing list. I’m a big fan of MailChimp and have been with them since their early days. Unfortunately, the landing page builder was much less flexible than I expected and there were no existing templates to choose from. At least I haven’t found them. I decided to create my landing page by hand using one of the website builders and add MailChimp form integration. Squarespace or Wix should be pretty good for this task.

It took about an hour to create the landing page that looks professional enough. After all, we’re going to sell design prints, so style is essential. I’ve also disconnected the domain from the Shopify store and connected it to the site builder so that if you go to the primary domain a landing page is shown. Shopify store is still accessible using internal Shopify subdomain so we can continue iterating with products and design. It took some time to get two paragraphs of copy written, but it’s still subject to change, so I haven’t spent a lot of time on it at this point.

After adding already working link to the Instagram bio, I felt like things should have been this way from the very beginning. Now the whole page looks like a real product that is going to be launched, and you can go and subscribe to the list (I tested). Of course, I knew that our shop is real but when I was starting out all I had was an empty Instagram account and an empty shop with a bunch of uploaded products. Not very promising. Now we’re in a much better spot, and I can even show this to friends and family without feeling embarrassed.

Telling the story

I decided to add a bit of personal touch both to Instagram profile bio and to the landing page. I’ve added our real names and mentioned that we’re a creative couple. On the landing page, I even included our photo taken about six months ago. A bit blurry, but it’s better to do it this way than postpone whole publishing thing until the new picture is taken. I think that it’s important to tell the story behind the project, share who we are and why we are doing this. It should be much easier for people to connect with us emotionally this way.