Send a free guide from Instagram DMs without Google Drive links

The freebie DM is the most common automation on Instagram. Comment GUIDE, get the guide. What arrives is usually one of three things, and all three have problems.

A Google Drive link asks people to sign in or shows them a permissions error. A PDF downloads to a phone and lands in a Files app most people never open again. A Notion page loads slowly, shows the Notion chrome, and looks like your notes rather than your product.

Documents in autoreplyig are the fourth option: you write the guide in the app, and it becomes a page at a short link that opens instantly.

Why the delivery format matters more than you think

Someone commented on your Reel thirty seconds ago. They are still in the app, still scrolling, with your DM open in one hand.

If your link opens a page, they read it now. If it downloads a file, they intend to read it later, and later means never. The difference shows up in whether anyone replies to your DM, which is the thing that opens a conversation and eventually sells something.

PDFs also read badly on a phone. You built it in Canva at A4, so now they are pinching and dragging across a page designed for print.

Writing the document

Documents live under Documents in the sidebar. New document gives you a markdown editor with a live preview.

If you have not used markdown, the toolbar covers it: bold, headings, lists, links, tables. The preview on the right is exactly what a follower sees, so there is no publish-and-check loop.

The Templates button has starting points for the formats that come up most: a five-step guide, a rate card with a pricing table, a link hub, an FAQ, a mini course lesson, a recipe. Each one is a skeleton with square-bracket placeholders you replace. They are there so you start editing rather than staring at an empty box.

The Insert button drops in a table, a callout quote, a checklist and so on at your cursor, if you would rather build the structure by hand.

Keep it short

The temptation with a long-form editor is to write long. Resist it.

The best-performing freebies I have seen are one screen of actual advice with a specific number in it. "Shoot at f/2.8, ISO 400, and stand two steps closer than feels right" is worth more than four paragraphs about the philosophy of portraits.

A structure that works: a one-line intro that confirms they are in the right place, the thing itself in numbered steps, and one line at the end telling them what to do next. That last line matters. Reply to the DM, follow for part two, book a call. Pick one.

Publishing and sending

New documents start as drafts. The public link returns a 404 until you flip the Published switch and save, which catches the most common mistake: sending a link to a document you never published.

Once it is live, copy the link from the header. It looks like autoreplyig.com/d/aV9Myd. The id is random rather than built from your title, so an internal name like "guide v3 final" never shows up in the URL.

Then attach it in the Builder. Set your DM format to Buttons, add a button, and use the picker under the URL field to select the document. Carousel cards have the same picker on every button, which is how you send a three-card DM where one card links to the guide and another links to a form.

The link preview

When your link lands in a DM, Instagram shows a preview card. You control what it says in the Link preview box at the bottom of the editor: a description and a cover image.

Write the description as a promise, not a title. "The 5 lighting setups, with settings" beats "My guide". The cover image is optional, but a card with an image takes up more space in the conversation and gets tapped more.

What happens after they read it

Every document page counts views, which you can see on the list screen. That number is your read rate against the click count in Analytics, and it is usually lower than people expect.

If it is much lower, the problem is normally the preview card rather than the document itself. People decide whether to tap based on that card.

There is one thing documents deliberately do not do: they do not collect anything. No email gate, no capture form embedded in the page. If you want the guide to also capture an address, put a form link at the end of it, or send both in a carousel and let people pick.

Housekeeping

Document pages are never indexed by search engines. They are your content, delivered to people you chose, so they carry noindex headers and are blocked in robots.txt. That also means a document is not a substitute for a blog post if you are trying to rank for something.

Anyone with the link can read it, which is the point. It is unguessable but not private, so do not put client work or anything confidential in one.

Every published page carries a small "Made with autoreplyig" line at the bottom. That is deliberate and not removable.

If you are starting from scratch

Get the automation running first with comment-to-DM, then write one document and attach it. One good guide beats five drafts, and you will learn more from the first set of replies than from another week of editing.