WordPress Plugin Spotlight: InstaGo

When we talk with clients about building a website, they often think the work ends once the site is launched. For us at eWebscapes, that may be true, but for the client, once the site is launched, that’s when the real work begins. That’s when they have to focus on marketing. Luckily, there are WordPress plugins to help you with that. Today, we’re putting the spotlight on one of them: InstaGo.

Many of our clients have to make marketing decisions based on their budget, a common factor among small businesses across the board. To save on out-of-pocket expenses, website owners frequently take on marketing tasks themselves, such as social media, and of course, blogging.

Writing fresh and engaging content on your site is a great opportunity for visitors to come back over and over again to see what’s new at your company. We, ourselves, are big fans of blogging and use it here on our website to provide useful information about running a small business, marketing, and WordPress. Sometimes, all three of those topics collide, like they’re about to do right now.

Necessity is the mother of invention

In 2016, our parent company, WebDevStudios, launched Pluginize.com to showcase a number of WordPress plugins we’ve built over the years. Our plan for marketing the site? You guessed it: blogging and social media. Instagram was becoming REALLY popular at the time, so it made sense to create a quick graphic and write up a short post to share on the platform. But then we encountered a problem with our marketing strategy. Instagram didn’t allow for adding a link directly to our latest blog article within the post. The only option was to direct people to click the link in bio. So, to get somebody to click a link and visit our latest blog post, we had to change the URL in our bio each time we published a new article. This is both time-consuming and a complete nuisance.

We had to come up with a better way. We called it InstaGo.

Write, click, go

Our goal was to create a process that made it easy for the link in our Instagram bio to always link to our latest and most relevant content. The result is a WordPress plugin that does only one thing but does it really well. Here’s how it works.

After you install and activate InstaGo on your website, edit your Instagram bio and set your website URL to use this format:

https://yourdomainname.com/go/

(Note: replace yourdomainname.com with your actual domain name.)

Now, sit back and relax, because this will be the last time you need to modify your Instagram bio ever!

Back on your own website, right before you click the Publish button on that amazing new blog post you just wrote yourself, click the InstaGo Redirect check box. Once published, any visitor who visits your /go/ link will automatically be redirected to your latest post.

Simple.

Not just for Instagram

While Instagram was the initial inspiration behind the development of this WordPress plugin, the fact is that Instago can (and should) be used anywhere. The /go/ link can be included on your Twitter or Facebook bios with a note about viewing your latest content. You could even include the link in your email signature as a way of sharing your latest post. See my Twitter bio as a visual example of what I what I mean.

When you’ve made the choice to do your own blogging and social media as a part of your marketing strategy and budget, your time is your most valuable asset. Tools that save you a few minutes every time you write a new post are invaluable. InstaGo did that for us and can do the same for you.

We have some other tools that we’ll be over the coming weeks and months. If you have a tool that saves you time marketing your website and business, please share it in the comments below.