Building a blog does not bring anyone to it. You have to create doorways so that people can actually find their way in. That is something I learned from my AI partner Kuro (Claude).
This post is about my first step in that direction: adding a link to my blog in my Instagram profile. It is a small piece of work, but I want to record it, including what Kuro and I said to each other along the way.
It started with “how do people find a blog?”
I had published a few posts, and then a quiet worry crept in. I am writing all of this, but is anybody going to read it?
So I asked Kuro straight out: how do you get people to see a blog?
If you are already on Instagram or YouTube, the best place to start is building a “doorway” from there to your blog. Instagram in particular lets you put a link in your profile section.
I have been posting about fishing and DIY on both Instagram and YouTube for a long time. The suggestion was simply to connect that existing audience to my new AI blog.
“Attract readers from zero” versus “use what you already have” — the second idea never occurred to me on my own. I had been quietly assuming that a new blog meant starting from nothing, when in fact I had accounts sitting there that I had spent years building.
Why it has to be the profile field
My first reaction was, can I not just write the URL in the text of a post? Kuro corrected that misunderstanding right away.
On Instagram, a URL written in the body of a post does not become a tappable link. The only place you can reliably put a link that people can tap and follow is your profile section. That is why it is the one real doorway you have.
I had no idea. That explains why everybody else’s Instagram has all their links collected in the profile too. I had seen that pattern a hundred times and never asked myself why it existed.
This is exactly the kind of thing I am grateful to be able to ask an AI about. It is obvious once someone says it, and there is no natural moment in life when someone says it to you. You do not know you are missing it, so you never think to search for it.
The steps Kuro walked me through
My Instagram profile already had three links registered on it: my fishing blog, my fishing YouTube channel, and my DIY YouTube channel. The plan was to add the AI blog as a fourth.
Kuro gave me the route.
Open “Edit profile” from your profile screen and go to the “Links” item. Choose “Add external link” there, enter your blog’s URL and a title, and you are done.
Written out like that, it is a job of a couple of minutes. I opened the app expecting to be finished before my tea went cold.
Then I got stuck: there was no button
I opened the screen where the links are managed, and the “add” button — the one thing I needed — was nowhere to be seen.
“There is no button!” I went crying back to Kuro again.
Try scrolling all the way down the screen first. If it still is not there, go back and come in again through “Edit profile” — it usually appears that way. Apps move their buttons around between versions, so this happens a lot.
I did as I was told and came back in through “Edit profile,” and the add button simply appeared. I registered the fourth link without any further trouble.
On my own, I think there is a real chance I would have looked at that screen, concluded “there is no button, so this is impossible,” and given up on the whole idea.
What a five-minute job taught me
Add one link to Instagram. As a task, it takes a few minutes at most.
But for me, every single part of it came from Kuro. The idea of using social media to bring readers to a blog at all. The knowledge that the profile field is the only place a link actually works. And the way out when the button would not show itself.
Each of those is tiny on its own. What matters is that they turn “I do not know, so I cannot move” into “right, then do it like this” on the spot. Growing a blog is probably nothing but a pile of moments like that, one after another.
If you already have social accounts, the first thing to build is a path from them to your blog. Doing that with an AI helping was by far the easiest way I have found.
Where this goes next
I have been running fishing and DIY accounts on social media and YouTube for years. My hope is that by connecting this new AI blog to what I have already been publishing, I can grow my readership little by little.
What doorway to build next is another thing I plan to talk over with Kuro.
Next time I will write about the trouble I had when the voice input app Aqua Voice suddenly stopped working, and how Kuro and I solved it. If you want the background on that, I wrote about why I chose Aqua Voice for voice input, and the story of the scare itself is in the warning that turned out to be a false positive.
