Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Selling on Instagram Stories works best when every post teaches something useful first and hides the pitch behind a one-word DM keyword, letting a ManyChat automation turn that reply into an unlimited, hands-off sales conversation.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

You sell a course, coaching offer, or digital product and already post to Instagram Stories regularly.
You want a repeatable daily content formula instead of guessing what to post.
You're open to setting up a DM chatbot (ManyChat or similar) to handle keyword replies automatically.

SKIP IF…

You don't use Instagram Stories as part of your business at all.
You're looking for organic growth or reach tactics rather than a monetization structure.

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

The video argues that consistent Instagram Stories sales come from pitching daily but subtly: teach something useful, then let a single keyword reply route the viewer into a ManyChat automation that delivers more value before landing on a checkout page. The creator walks through her own story archive, contrasting a soft, teaching-first pitch against a direct 'join our coaching group' pitch, then opens her ManyChat backend to show replies like 'light bulb,' 'leverage,' and 'caption' each triggering a scripted DM sequence that ends in a product link. The core formula — teach a tip, reply a keyword for more value, then pitch — is meant to be reused every few months since audiences don't track repeats, with two paid resources (a template pack and an automation course) offered at the end for viewers who want the built-out version.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 00:38

01 · Introduction

Maria states her $6M-in-four-years result and promises a practical walkthrough of how she uses Stories for business.

00:38 – 02:57

02 · Pitch daily, but subtly

States the core rule and opens her Story archive to contrast a subtle, teaching-first pitch against a direct 'join our coaching group' pitch.

02:57 – 05:18

03 · Leverage automations

Screen-shares ManyChat, showing how a Story reply keyword (e.g. 'light bulb') triggers a scripted DM that ends at a checkout page.

05:18 – 07:57

04 · Examples of her automations

Walks through more keyword flows ('leverage,' 'caption'), each landing on the same passive-income checkout page or a free resource.

07:57 – 11:27

05 · The formula, resources, and close

Names the teach → keyword → pitch formula explicitly, notes content gets reused every few months, and points to her templates and automation course.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

A subtle pitch teaches a lesson first and only links to an offer through one small keyword reply at the very end.
Keyword-triggered DM automations let a single Instagram Story generate unlimited one-on-one sales conversations without live chatting.
Reusing the same Story content every three to four months works because audiences don't notice or remember the repeat.
About 95% of the pitches in this workflow route to one checkout page, showing a single funnel can carry an entire content calendar.
The stated bar is $50 a day in revenue per 100 Instagram followers — falling short signals a broken pitch funnel, not a reach problem.
The formula is three fixed beats: teach a tip, deliver more value behind a keyword reply, then pitch at the very end.
A direct pitch like 'join our coaching group' is treated as a weaker fallback than a subtle, teaching-first pitch.
ManyChat's flow-duplication feature lets a buyer copy an entire built-out automation system instead of building keyword triggers from scratch.
Reply counts on each keyword function as free market research, showing which topic or offer is resonating before more content is built around it.

Takeaway

A three-beat DM formula turns Stories into a sales funnel

THE FORMULA

Teach a tip, deliver more value behind a keyword reply, then pitch — repeated daily and recycled every few months, this loop is what turns ordinary Story posts into a consistent DM sales channel.

Lead every post with a real lesson before any pitch, so the sale feels secondary to the value rather than the headline.
Route interested viewers through a single keyword reply instead of a visible link — the reply itself signals real intent.
Stack a second layer of value inside the automated DM before the pitch appears, so the viewer gets two payoffs, not one sales pitch.
Point the large majority of pitches at one checkout page or offer rather than splitting attention across many products.
Recycle proven content every three to four months instead of constantly creating new material — audiences don't track repeats.
Track reply volume on each keyword as a live signal of which topic or offer is resonating before investing more in it.
Reserve direct, no-teaching pitches for high-trust channels rather than cold Story traffic, where they tend to land worse.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

ManyChat: A chatbot platform that automates Instagram and Facebook DMs, firing a pre-built message sequence whenever someone replies with a specific keyword.
Keyword automation: A DM sequence set to trigger automatically whenever a follower replies to a Story or post with one designated word, like 'leverage' or 'caption.'
Flow: A single automated message sequence inside ManyChat, built once and fired by any keyword trigger or button tap.
Subtle pitch: A promotional Story that reads as a teaching moment first, ending in a soft call-to-action instead of a direct sales ask.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

03:41productAutomation Sales Unlocked: Using ManyChat to Make Money ↗

04:39productPassive Income With Instagram ↗

09:34productViral Instagram Content Templates ↗

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:41

“Pitching subtly is not buy my stuff, buy my stuff — here's a link to buy my stuff. That's obviously annoying, and you know better than that.”

names the mistake it's warning against in one breath→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

08:31

“I would say 95% of the time, this goes to my checkout page.”

a blunt stat that reveals the whole funnel in one line→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

09:15

“You can reuse keywords after a certain amount of time... I do it all the time and nobody ever notices.”

permission-giving, counterintuitive claim→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

10:12

“If you have a 100 Instagram followers or more, you should be making $50 per day with your Instagram account.”

concrete, testable benchmark→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

00:00So I make a lot of money with Instagram Stories, and what I wanna do in this video is show you how to use Instagram Stories for business. So how can you make a bunch of money with Stories? In case you don't know me, my name is Maria Wendt.

00:12I've made over $6,000,000 in the last four years leveraging Instagram a lot and also selling courses, but I do that on Instagram. So, uh, Instagram is, like, my main thing that sells my courses.

00:22So, um, what I wanna do is show you how I use Instagram Stories for my business and what you can do too. So it's gonna be very practical, um, and I'm literally just gonna show you how I do it. So the first thing that I want you to know is that you should be pitching daily in your Stories, but pitching subtly.

00:40So pitching subtly is not buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my so here's a link to buy my stuff. No.

00:46That's obviously annoying, and you know better than that. Right? What you're actually gonna do is start pitching subtly.

00:51So I'm gonna go to what I can do is I can go to my archive, and then I can see all my stories. And you can kinda see an example of, um, some pitches that I do.

01:03So, um, so this is a great example of one.

01:07Okay? So this is a subtle pitch. Okay?

01:09This is linking to a checkout page. I'm just gonna pause this so you can see it. Um, this is a real example of my journey as an entrepreneur.

01:17So I made $63 in my first year all the way down to $3,600,000 in the last year, so this year. And then you can see here, um, the text on the bottom, which says, notice that light bulb where I jumped from 300 k to a million.

01:30I had a massive light bulb moment. So I'm just teaching. Right?

01:33This is essentially a teaching, um, it's a teaching story, but then this light bulb thing here is gonna go to an automation.

01:41So I'm gonna talk about automations in step two. You gotta leverage automations. I will talk about that in a minute, but I just wanna show a couple examples of this so you can get the hang of it.

01:48So here's another example. Picture of me and my daughter at this beautiful Northern California beach, little bit of teaching, pitch at the bottom, and that little pitch goes to a free YouTube video.

01:59And then, um, you can see here another example. So this is actually, like, one of three, So you can do it this way too.

02:06So, essentially, I'm teaching, and at the very end is a keyword, um, that pitches, but it's it's subtle. Right?

02:12I'll give you an example of a less than subtle pitch so you can see the difference. This is a less than subtle pitch. I'm literally saying, hey.

02:18This is a course. You should come join it, right, with some testimonials. That would be a more direct pitch when you're just, um, or, like, here's a So direct you can see here, join our coaching group.

02:29That's a direct pitch. The cool thing is, right, like, these posts tend to do really well. I don't know.

02:36You can't see, but they're like I get, like, a bun because people are replying, it creates a lot of engagement. So I really, really like these kinds. So the thing that you need to know if you're gonna start using Instagram stories for your business is you need to be pitching daily but subtly, where you're giving some value, and then at the end, there's a little keyword, and you're gonna leverage that automation.

02:55Now I wanna show you, um, I wanna teach you a little bit about what I mean by leveraging automation. So we'll go back to this example.

03:03And when they reply with the word light bulb, I have an automation that I have set up to send a link to the one of my courses on like, one of my courses, but I wanna show you how I do it.

03:16Okay? Um, because it's done really intentionally. So we're gonna leverage automations, but we're not gonna be, like, over the top about it.

03:23So let me just turn this off because I'm gonna share my screen. I'm gonna do some fancy fancy stuff here.

03:30Okay. So we're gonna share my screen. There we go.

03:33It's my other YouTube video. I'm batching them out today. I've got pizza on the way, so I'm trying to hurry.

03:38Um, let me just put this in do not disturb. God knows what could come through. Okay.

03:43So we're gonna go to ManyChat. That's what I use. I highly recommend ManyChat.

03:48I have an entire course on leveraging automation. So what I'm gonna show you is, like, 1000000000% of all the cool things you can do with ManyChat, all the cool things I have done.

03:56So I will link to my automation course down below, but let me just show. So they were gonna search for the word light bulb.

04:03Right? They were supposed to reply light bulb. So when they reply light bulb to my story, they get this big block of text.

04:10Okay? This is teaching them. So I was teaching, and then I'm teaching even more.

04:16Right? So I'm it's when I when I say pitch daily but subtly, it's pretty subtle. Right?

04:21So it's here's a very valuable piece of information. Reply with this keyword to get even more valuable information. And at the very end, then I pitch.

04:31Right? And that's the link to my course. This is the course that I have where I teach how I sell all this low ticket stuff, um, basically, how I set this up.

04:39So I'm I'm showing you part of what's in this course, but it's just the Instagram stories part. There's also a whole bunch of stuff you can do with Instagram reels. There's a whole bunch of stuff you can do with Instagram carousels.

04:49So, um, that is essentially what it looks like. If we go back, I'll pull up.

04:54Let me just do that really quickly because I want you to see. If we pull up show my iPhone.

05:00Okay. So if we go back here just so it's visually not so cluttered. Okay.

05:05So if I go back here and we pull up a couple other stories, just wanna show you. So let's go to the word leverage. Right?

05:11So if we go to the word leverage, just gonna search the word leverage.

05:18I can spell. I want you to see what this one looks like. Okay.

05:21So this is what they would get. They reply leverage, and then, um, this is the old one.

05:31So you can kinda see here, this is what it looked like. We're rebuilding them and making them a little bit more, um, variety just because I have so much traffic coming through.

05:38But here's the old one. It's very simple. Um, so this one, you can see here on the left hand side with my story up.

05:46You can see the reply leverage, and then when they click it, it's a link to a free resource.

05:52Right? So the if you look on the right hand side, it says I'm gonna give you this for free. They reply leverage, and then they get the resource for free.

05:59Again, the automation stuff can feel very overwhelming. I totally get that, which is why I made a course on how you can leverage automations, how you can set all of this up. You can literally the course that I created on this is literally just step by step.

06:11So I will link to that at the bottom. Um, you can also just Google it, like, if you wanna figure it out all by yourself. But if you do buy my course, um, I've done all of it for you so you can literally just, like, copy and paste every, um, automation that I've built.

06:23I've got coupon automations. I've got just all kinds of stuff. So I would check it out if that's something you're interested in doing, but you don't have to at all.

06:29You can totally do this by yourself if you want to. Okay. Let me just what I wanna do now is just show you a couple more examples of how you can do subtle pitches with even just, your face, so, like, talking heads.

06:44So let me see if I can find it. This is an example of a lot of you guys know I have a Facebook coaching group where I answer your questions every single day.

06:53That's a hard pitch. That's not a subtle pitch. You can do this too in your Instagram stories, but what I wanna show you is the more subtle pitch because people tend to like those better.

07:00So this one here. Good morning.

07:03Happy hump day. Cannot believe it's already Wednesday. Listen.

07:07I have figured out what works super well for captions. I wanna teach you. Just reply caption to the story, and I'm gonna send you the whole like, it's a little tutorial.

07:15Long captions don't work anymore. Long story short, long captions don't work anymore. So then when I go if we go here and we go to captions, caption, you can see here it's a very long testimonial.

07:33This works so well. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen here and just flip back to my face and then turn off the little circle one, um, because I wanna just give you a couple more pointers.

07:44Um, but that is essentially it. You can see here as you look through how I'm using Instagram Stories for my business is just to pitch subtly every single day. And you can reuse stuff you've already taught.

07:56Like, you've already taught a bunch of stuff. You don't need to recreate this from scratch. Think about the stuff you are already teaching, you've already taught, you've already typed, and put it on your story, and then the formula is basically this.

08:09Okay? Story that teaches, keyword, like, little tutorial, and then at the very bottom, um, and I'll show you again just to make sure you really got this part because I don't want you to miss this part.

08:20At the very bottom of these, above all else so this is where I pitch. There's this tutorial, and then at the very bottom is where I pitch.

08:31And that always goes to my checkout page. So, um, I would say 95% of the time, this goes to my checkout page. And so I'm giving double value, right, two things of value, and then I say, hey.

08:43By the way, like, if you have a 100 Instagram followers or more, you should be making $50 per day with your Instagram account. If you're not, that's a problem, and I'll show you how to fix that problem with my passive income with Instagram course. It's one of my most popular courses.

08:56You may already have it. A lot of people do. Um, and so that is what I don't wanna pull up the FaceTime here.

09:02Um, that is how I use Instagram Stories for my business. Daily pitches every single day that go to keywords and by the way, you can reuse keywords after a certain amount of time. So, like, let's say it's been four months, three months, reuse the same content.

09:17Put the same content on your stories. I do it all the time and nobody ever notices. Um, that's what I do.

09:22So if you need help with a couple of different things, I have some resources for you to help you. Okay?

09:29First thing I have is if you are worried about creating those stories, I created viral content templates. So I took my best stories like the ones you saw on there, but I collected the very best ones, the ones that got tens of thousands of views, and I put them all together, and I created template tutorial.

09:48So you can just use those. So if you wanna check out my viral content templates, you can do so. I'll put a link in the description.

09:54Other resource that I have for you is my automation course where I teach you the automation part. So if the first part teaches you the Instagram story part, the second part teaches you the automation part. So how to set it all up, and if you buy my my course, you can literally just copy literally, there's a setting in ManyChat where you can duplicate the flow, and it will be using the things I've already built.

10:14So you won't have to build any automations at all, which can be really, really nice and will save you a lot of time. So those are the two resources I'm gonna link down below. Again, you can absolutely Google it and figure it out.

10:23I don't want you to think you have to. You have what you need to start making money from your Instagram Stories, which is understanding that first, I'm going to teach.

10:33So I'm gonna teach a tip. Second, I'm going to have them reply a specific keyword.

10:39That keyword is gonna teach them more things. Right? So you saw they're always that longer chunk, and then I'm gonna pitch at the very end.

10:46Right? I'm gonna pitch a link to my course, a link to my offer, a link to my service, whatever it is I'm selling at the bottom of that second one. That formula is tested and true and works so well for me.

10:58Um, if you wanna get the resources, you totally can. They're optional, though. I don't want you to feel like you don't have what you need.

11:02You have everything you need in order to start making money from your Instagram Stories. So that is how I would use Instagram Stories for my business. It's literally how I use Instagram Stories for my business.

11:12Case again, and we're just meeting, my name is Maria Went. I've made over $6,000,000 in big part thanks to Instagram, and I just like showing women how to make money. So, hopefully, I'll see you in the next video.

11:21Be sure to subscribe. I got a lot of good stuff on here about making money, and I'll see you in the next one.

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Maria Wendt opens with the number that makes the rest of the video worth watching — $6,000,000 from Instagram in four years — then spends eleven minutes showing exactly which keyword reply turns a single Story into a paying customer.

Frameworks