Flow State Business

Struggling to sell on Instagram? Try this instead

• Ruby Lee

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This week I sold $0 high ticket on Instagram. 

Not a post, not a story, not a thing landed. I share what I learned, how I’m shifting, and why IG is still powerful - but not for what you think.

Keeping this one real because flow sometimes has it's ebbs. 

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Take a look at my emails and what I send here.

 Hi everyone. Welcome to today's episode. This one's definitely gonna sound different for a couple of reasons. One is, I am holed up in my bedroom at the moment because I'm at the mercy of 10 of three 10-year-old boys, I should say, who are all lovely and wonderful in their own right, but they have taken over my house.

I am single parenting it this week because my husband's away on a footy trip. And I'm here on school holidays with Teddy's mates and they're having the time of their life. They are loving it. They've been in the pool most days, all of that, but they're in and out and it is super loud. And also as a fun fact, my home studio backs onto Teddy's room, so there's no way I would be able to record in my usual setup with my microphone and all of that.

So I am on a different microphone today. It doesn't matter. It actually really doesn't. And hopefully this is a nice little reminder that done is better than perfect and I've so much that I need to get done today and into the next few days because we are going to Korea and Japan and I'm so pumped for it and I cannot wait until the boys leave to get this done.

Plus, I just wanna chat to you guys and this is definitely gonna be one of those episodes that is also gonna sound very different because. It's not gonna be one of those glossy, I am winning at life, and so are my clients winning in their businesses type of episodes. Like today, it's gonna go down as one of those.

I share the good and the bad. I share the ups and the downs. So it's definitely more on the shockingly bad side of things and. Really downside of things. I had a really bad week last week just mentally thinking about like, whoa, how much has changed? But also, I'm not sure why it surprised me so much. Like I knew it was coming, but to put it into play and to see it actually play out was a real shocker to me and it was really challenging to move through it.

So let's talk about it because what I do wanna discuss today is for the first time since I started putting myself out there online, which has been. Seven years plus now, and any time that I have gone to Instagram in particular, but you know, we can put social media as a whole. 'cause most of socials now is very much in the same bucket.

But for the first time since I put myself out there on Instagram and spoke about my high ticket offering, I did not sell a single spot on Instagram. Not one now. I wanna definitely walk through this and I've had some time to think about it, but I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. It absolutely stung and I'm so used to, I mean like at least 3, 4, 5 people DMing me a day asking me for the link or asking me around like some questions on the high ticket.

From time to time asking me if there's an opportunity to jump on like an Instagram, back and forth DM chat about certain things, but this time it was also complete crickets, complete silence, and it was so disappointing. Now I am seven years into my business. I predominantly built my business off high ticket, so it's only really been the last nine months that I have switched my messaging to low ticket to daily sales, and it's been such a blast.

Like my low ticket daily sales are flowing now. Like I don't need to worry about them. They generate 500 to $5,000 a day. Off it goes. But today I am really talking about the high ticket. Enrollments and, you know, anyway, let's, let's really keep peeling the layers back. 'cause I wanna give you as much perspective as possible.

I really am someone who treats everything in my business as an experiment. For those of you that know human design, I actually have like the experimenter in me, whatever it's called. It's like the person who like goes in and tries stuff and then comes back to report it. That's me, that's my design. And if this one experiment for me defined who I am in my business, I feel like if I wasn't strong energetically and if I hadn't done a lot of the work around entering flow state, regardless of the outcome and not having it mean anything and detaching from those results, I really feel like I would be a very messy, anxious pile of wobbly jelly right now.

Like it just would not. I would not be here speaking about it because there would be ego, there would be pride, there would be massive disappointment. I would make it mean something, but it doesn't mean that much to me in the greater scheme of things. But I just wanna report back to you guys on what happened and what I think is going on right now in terms of the greater Instagram economy, in terms of the greater coaching economy and.

You know, I just wanna say, I am not making this mean that I'm failing in high ticket, or that people don't want my high ticket offers. Instead, the way that I'm approaching this conversation is kind of like a scientist, right? Like my dad is a scientist, so. I've learned a lot actually around how it's approached.

And you know, in any laboratory, if something fails, if an experiment fails, if a test fails, it's actually a good thing because it gets them closer to the answers that they're looking for. And to me, when this happens, it also means that it's time to test a new formula. It's time to test something different.

So let's talk about the shift on Instagram. I wanna start here because Instagram is a totally different beast. Than it was a few years ago. I remember that I could literally post a carousel with a high ticket offer, call to action at the end with a super long caption. And by the way, on the carousel, it would be a coffee, it would be where I'm traveling.

It would be like an airport lounge, literally just photos taken from my iPhone with no edits and terrible filters over the top, and it would literally fill up my mastermind. And that worked. That worked in 2019 through to 20 22, 23, and 24. It definitely started to taper off and change, and here we are now in 2025.

So when that worked right, people were in the habit of consuming longer content on Instagram. They were happy to go through 16. Slides of your Instagram stories and go through carousels of your personal life, lifestyle goals and read long captions. But now I feel, and let me know if you disagree. I'm really happy to kind of see both sides of the coin here.

But in my experience this year, I just really feel like Instagram is very much a short form content machine. Think about reels like some of the reels that we're creating literally six seconds long stories, like we're told to do one or two stories, and that's what keeps the engagement going. Although I think that's changing back.

I'm not sure quick dopamine hits of any kind, like even a really even know exciting hook or a really shocking first line to your caption. They're the quick dopamine hits. The pace is fast. The attention span is really short. When you try and sell high ticket in that environment, you are competing with an uphill battle of attention.

Like think about it this way, you are trying to convince somebody to spend putting your dollar amount here, whatever it is, your $3,000 program, your 5,010 K program. So you are asking them to spend up to 10 K, let's say. You are asking them to sign basically a mortgage. In their mind it's, it may as well be a mortgage.

It's such a big decision in the middle of a TikTok dance, so the environment really doesn't match the decision. Right. Like Instagram to me now, like just taking a step back is amazing. For so many other things. And, and here's the good news, and this is what I'm so glad that I made that shift. You know, December last year, things really started to change for me 'cause I, enough was enough.

I felt the uphill battle, it was getting worse and worse and worse in terms of like my mental state and feeling energetically really back in my body. So anyway, as some of you will know, last year in December, I wrote my first PDF. And here we are now, almost at the end of September, and I've experienced daily sales every single day through low ticket.

We are just literally experiencing the best year in business ever. The biggest client float, despite not being able to launch high ticket on Instagram the way that we used to. We've made more money this year than we have in any other year, honestly, like, especially in terms of passive income. But I think the good news around Instagram is this, like Instagram is still extremely needed and it's still extremely powerful.

But if you are a coach, mentor, or service provider, I don't think it's the way that we're, we're not supposed to use it the way that we always have, and we're not supposed to use it the way that we've been conditioned to use. So it is absolutely incredible for things like getting eyeballs on your brand at scale.

It's amazing at bringing new people into your world daily if you are posting the way the algorithm wants you to post. Making these reels, putting up stories, posting consistently. Creating amazing hooks, posting carousels, maybe boosting, you know, a post or two. Absolutely incredible. With that, I personally found to sell of my clients that it's amazing for offering a quick no-brainer entry point, right?

Like a $27 PDF, or. $47 mini course. Amazing at that. Like you can make sales every day just doing your usual Instagram thing. I really, truly believe that everyone who has over, you know, 200 followers, you can be doing that. Making cute little fun, $27 sales every single day. And it's also amazing for growing your followers and turning them into quick buyers.

Like I have seen this firsthand. My low ticket offers are flying on Instagram. My engagement has never been higher. I'm growing a hundred followers a week on Instagram at the moment, and it is absolutely amazing. I can post a reel and within literally five minutes I see a stripe notification coming in.

And no, it's not for, you know, a 3, 5, 10 K mastermind. But it's for a $47 minicourse. It's for $147 course. It's for a $7 PDF. And this is really where the turning point has been for me. And it's crystal clear. Those low ticket buyers are the ones who become high ticket clients off platform. Okay? I hope you heard me say that.

Those low ticket buyers are the ones who later become high ticket clients for me. Off platform. So one example is, I had a client, she is, hi Linda, you're amazing. So a client of mine, she somehow found me on YouTube. She bought a low ticket offer from me and then went straight into high ticket, which was amazing like, and that progression by the way, happened within days.

Actually, I think with Linda, she, that might not be a good example because she went from. Watching me on YouTube and I, no. And now I remember, she actually said this in the mastermind call after I binged on your YouTube videos, which by the way, long form Evergreen, so needed in this economy. Same with the podcast.

So needed in this economy. She said she watched three or four YouTube videos, binged it, and then tried to find my highest ticket offering. That is so amazing. Like I had the biggest smile on my dial when she said that in the mastermind call in another universe like. I can't think of who it was, but let's say quite recently, a client of mine said, oh, I remember now.

Yes. Okay. So a client of mine, Sarah said she found me on Instagram, bought a $27 PDF, and then went like within a week or two, came and joined the Mastermind. So these are the kind of flows that I see all the time and that whole journey between. A client who doesn't know me, to a client who goes into high ticket, it happens off platform.

Like the whole journey didn't start because I convinced them on Instagram to go straight to high ticket. Right? It started because they all got a taste of my work at a low entry point, which is incredible, and it makes it so much easier because guys, like I can see the potential of it. It means that I don't in the future ever need to do a massive launch again.

It means that if my low ticket is doing the work that it's doing and it's of highest quality, I'm treating it with respect. I'm treating it like a high ticket offer, just like I spoke about in the last podcast episode. It will convert into high ticket. All right? But the reason why high ticket doesn't click on ig, I wanna address this, and you know it is the elephant in the room.

High ticket doesn't work on Instagram because the psychology of the platform is that people are in scroll mode. They're not in deep decision mode. So the trust building needs more space, right? High ticket decisions happen where someone can think, reflect, and imagine themselves inside of your world, and often.

It's through the long form conversations. Often it's through getting a little peek into the window of what it's like to be in your energy. Now, in the past, that would've been an Instagram live for me. I would've done like a half an hour, maybe an hour long live stream on Instagram. People would be like, my God, I need to be in your energy.

Nowadays in 2025, it looks like me sitting down for a couple of hours writing A PDF, getting it out there, putting a paywall on the front of it, because I want real buyers, not just freebie hunters. And then they get in the energy of my coaching space because they're reading my journaling questions, they're reading my perspective shifts, they're reading about my story.

Another way to think about it is if I'm putting together a little mini course, which by the way, I have a course about how to make a course in a day. So if I sit down for one day and I create a course on a very specific question that I'm answering for somebody, they are absolutely going to understand my coaching style.

My coaching style is really relaxed, it's very conversational, it's very experienced and examples based. It's very hands-on and it's very soul led, very soul connected. So they'll be able to experience that from these mini courses. So this is where I am just loving it, right? Like it doesn't feel in any way when I'm launching as though I am pushing on, you know, trying to make these high ticket sales and it doesn't feel like I'm pushing in the wrong context.

So, you know, for example, on a fast moving app like Instagram. I'm not asking for a 5K offer. In fact, I think I've just decided I'm gonna lay totally all the way back and not make any high ticket sales at all on Instagram. Like it is not something that I will be doing for quite some time after this experiment.

So it's, this is where it just feels so good, right? Like on a fast moving app, a 5K offer can sometimes feel like someone is yelling. Buy a car while you are browsing at memes, right? It doesn't land. It doesn't land. It's too big an ask. So this is where I really have to reframe some things, and with my scientist mindset on, I'm thinking about like, Ooh, what does this experiment tell me?

It doesn't, I don't go to the emotional side that much anymore, guys. Like it's not something that I lean on. Instead, what I do is I am thinking about this perceived failure. As data, right? It's just like in an experiment, if the reaction doesn't happen, you don't burn the entire lab down, right? You say, okay, that mix doesn't work.

Let's just adjust it. Let's look at the formulation. Let's look at the flow. Let's look at what exactly what part of it isn't working. That's what this week has taught me. High ticket spoken about on Instagram just isn't working the way it used to, but I'm not quitting high ticket. No way. I love it. I adore being in my high ticket spaces.

I love being with my clients. It's like one of my favorite times of the week that I look forward to. 'cause I get to turn on all the lights, get the microphone going. Not this one, this one isn't as good as the one in my office, but also like. I get to just be in a space where it feels so incredibly soul connected and I get to actually be like, Hey guys, what's going on inside of your businesses?

And we sit there and we brainstorm and we have an entire brain's trust going. Right? And that's why I love what I get to do. I have the low ticket stuff going out and it's helping people on mass, and there's gonna be 90% of the low ticket clients who will love what I've got. And they will read the PDFs and they'll do the courses.

They may not be ready yet to come into high ticket. They're trying to work it out themselves. They may have other coaches. They might not be in the right, you know, life container right now to have capacity for a mastermind. However, for the people who are ready, they're on the inside and they're just like, yes, this is exactly where I need to be.

So in saying, so, I'm not quitting Instagram and I'm not quitting high ticket. Please don't get that wrong. It's, they're both very powerful parts of the business that's absolutely needed. I'm just adjusting to how I use them together and how they actually work together. Okay, so let's talk about what's still working for high ticket.

Here's what I'm seeing. High ticket. Is still selling and you might be watching someone on Instagram, you know, maybe it's another mentor or service provider or coach or speaker or author, and they are just killing it and you are wanting to see how they do it. Everybody has a different stage in their business.

That's really one thing that I've come to realize. It's not like. One person said something, it's the be all, end all. So I'm gonna encourage you, you are hearing me take a fairly strong stance on Instagram and high ticket. You might be following somebody else who is converting on Instagram high ticket really easily, and then it's up to you to make that conclusion around how it feels in your body.

What feels awesome, if you wanna do. Sales calls and have long dms and post, post, post and do live streams and convert that way and spend like hundreds and thousands on ads, do that because it feels exciting to you and it feels like a great challenge. If you are hearing what I'm saying around, you know what, I wanna give low ticket a bit more of a go and I wanna see how this like daily sales model works because.

I get it, but I dunno how it would work in my business. And I need to learn then. Welcome, welcome to my world. Like this is what I absolutely love talking about. But here are some of the things that I'm noticing around what's still working for high ticket. High ticket is still selling. Okay. Um, it's absolutely still selling.

I've just sold $25,000 worth of high ticket mastermind sales, so there it is. And I did not sell one on Instagram. There it is. Where am I selling it? You are asking, I can hear all of you going, but where emails don't hate me for saying that. I can sometimes like sense the collective eye roll when I say emails because so many of you are lazy at growing your email lists.

I'm sorry for the harsh but true comment and so many of you are so shit at. Actually knowing what to do with emails. And I wanna say this with so much love and conviction, because I was the person who was so shit at not knowing what to do with my emails, like literally nine months ago. So I, I'm not that far ahead of you guys there.

But what I've realized is that people, especially my clients, my high ticket clients, open emails. So just to give you an idea, my emails are sitting at about 20 to 27% open rates right now. It's not super high, but I will take it, and I think it's actually close to industry average anyway. People open an email, they read the message, they sit with the message, and they click through when they're ready.

And I'm telling you of the 20 5K worth of Mastermind clients, they've all come from emails. Now, the other really important part. My long form content, so I'm not gonna go too deep into this one today because I've got way more, you know, other pieces of content. I'll actually link a YouTube video below for you to go and watch 'cause you kind of need to see how it all flows together.

But my long form content, such as the podcast and such as YouTube. Give space for your voice as a leader in the industry and as someone who people will lean on for direction. So your energy and your perspective is definitely gonna be amazing for your long form pieces of content. It's not gonna be from six second reel.

I'm so sorry guys, to burst that. Little short form bubble for you. It's great to get like quick eyeballs on your stuff, but it's not so great for building deep trust for high ticket. Okay. So the way I think about Instagram now after this experiment, and it has confirmed it, confirmed it, confirmed it is that Instagram is now my front door, the party invitation, so to speak, and the place where people get to know me and maybe buy something small to get a taste.

The deeper investments happen once we move the conversation somewhere deeper, somewhere more spacious, where I'm not forcing anyone to go into the deep containers, but they decide themselves. So there's a lesson in all of this. And you know, as always, I am a very wide open book here. The bigger lesson I wanna share is this, not every single launch is going to hit okay.

Here I am, seven years in saying, whoa, I don't know why Instagram did not produce a single high ticket sell for me this last week. That's okay. It's not gonna hit. Not every post is going to convert. I have so many posts on my feed that have had the worst, worst, worst engagement, and I'm not embarrassed about it.

I'm like, okay. Again, it's an experiment. But that doesn't mean that, you know, like my business is broken. It doesn't mean that my audience is over me. It doesn't mean that I am just like, you know, nodding my mojo. It doesn't even mean anything about like what the astrology is doing. It just means that the platform has shifted and by a behavior has shifted.

You've gotta shift with it. So instead of getting stuck in, oh, Instagram's not working for me, I want you to ask yourself. What is Instagram still brilliant for? Who is doing Instagram well, out of the what? What is it? Like 3 billion active users a day or some, something ridiculous like that on Instagram.

Who's using Instagram in a way where it fits in with my level of energy? How do they operate in their ecosystem? How can I design my business around that reality instead of resisting it? Okay, so wrapping things up because I can hear that the boys want to do something, like I literally heard a knock on the door and I'm just ignored them.

So yeah, in summary, they can wait. It's okay. You guys are more important this week. I didn't sell a single high ticket spot on Instagram. I wanna share that with all of you to keep it real on here, and I'm not gonna pretend. That it didn't sting because it did. But I'm also not gonna make it mean anything more than what it is, which is the data, the experiment, the formulation, the information.

Business is an experiment. Platforms change all the time. Daily. We don't even know what changes every single day. And you know, it's, it is a guessing game sometimes, but what isn't is we know biop psychology evolves. As entrepreneurs, we get to evolve right alongside it, and that's the exciting part. I choose to see it as exciting.

I choose to see it as, this is cool, it's different. So Instagram isn't dead. I know some of you're gonna listen to this and go, oh my God, Instagram's dead. Ruby said so high ticket isn't dead. Some of you're also gonna be like, oh my God, I'm doomed stuff. High ticket. We're just gonna sell $7 PDFs, and then you're gonna freak out about how you're gonna make money off $7 PDFs.

That's also not what I'm saying, but the relationship between the two, that's what's shifting. I want you to use Instagram as the front door lead with your low ticket office. Then move the deeper conversations off platform. If they're buying something from you, they're landing on your email list anyway, so I want you to really utilize your email list, and I want you to treat every single flop as just more data for your lab.

I'm actually gonna leave a link below where you can opt in to see what sort of emails I'm sending every single week. I think this is also really important because. What a lot of the, uh, people who have opted in already are seeing is that my emails are really cash. They're really short, they're very undone, they're messy.

They're kind of just like very offhand. But these are the emails that are literally selling like $25,000 worth of mastermind places. So go to the link below in the show notes and you can opt in. It's free. And I literally have screenshot, like every single one of my emails that I've sent in the last week or so, the cadence around it, how I set up my emails.

You'll just be shocked with how easy it is. And guys like, you know, at the end of the day, everything is fixable. Okay? Everything is fixable. I really do have to go now. I love you all. Let me know if you love this episode. Sorry if the sound sounds different, but you know, we gotta do what we gotta do.

Thanks for hanging out with me today. I'm so excited. Next week we've got an episode, a guest episode with one of my business besties. I'm gonna bring her on and when that comes out, I'll be in Japan and Korea, and then I'll catch you for a solo episode the week after that. Okay? Speak love, and I'll see you soon.