If you own your own domain name, you should NOT be using linktree and other services like it on your social media accounts!! And if you don’t own your own domain name (yet), perhaps this will provide you a bit more information why you should consider getting one and setting up your own website.
Social media is an important aspect of marketing these days, regardless of what business you are in. But what do you do if, like many people with multiple sidehustles and platforms they use, you want to or need to show more than just the single link in your profile that social media accounts allow you to? Sure, you could set up multiple different social media accounts and link each one individually to their respective website or landing page – but what if you don’t want to have multiple websites or in fact you don’t NEED multiple websites?
For example, you could be an artist / designer of POD (Print on Demand) merchandise and products and you could sell your products across a wide range of places like:-
- Redbubble
- Etsy
- Society 6
- Merch by Amazon
- eBay
- Gumroad
- Fivver
- and a whole lot more
Or maybe you’re a freelancer that offers services via Fivver, Upwork, any other service including your own website and you want to direct people to different places for different packages of things?
Or perhaps you’re a self published author that does Low content / No content books and don’t want to link to your Amazon author page that has limited capability but would rather build your own “Landing Pages” for each collection (like this one here) with non geographical tags and your own affiliate links – if any of these resonate then read on!
Your Instagram could showcase ALL your products, but perhaps some of them are only available on some platforms and not on others. Now of course it would be great if Instagram allowed us to publish links in our posts like Facebook and Twitter do – but the best we can do is post the normal “link in bio” which doesn’t work in this case – so what’s the solution?
Enter a whole new “link in bio” category of services like:-
- Linktree
- Campsite
- Swipop
- ContactInBio
- LinkInProfile
- and again, many more options to choose from.
Each of the above provide you exactly what you are looking for – the ability to have multiple links in your Instagram bio and some even provide simple analytics (like the number of times your links were clicked on) ……… but here’s the catch:- you are totally at the mercy of these services and you never know when they will change their terms of service – and NEVER forget the age old adage – “if you aren’t paying then YOU are the product” – meaning they WILL (they HAVE to) figure out a way to monetise the service or they will go broke!
Many of them (including linktree) charge a fee to get detailed analytics – I don’t know the exact details of what these are as I’ve never paid for any in the past but enough people must be paying for these to services continue.
Aside from that, if their service goes down or has any issues, your links are dead – not a great customer experience!
Hands up – I’ll admit that when I first started out, I used the free version of linktree as my solution across 3 different Instagram and Twitter accounts I run. I would occasionally check my link in my bio, only to discover that for some strange reason it was no longer working and I’d have to edit my bio and paste the link in again. What was annoying is that I didn’t know how long my bio had been going without a working link in it and I had no idea how much traffic I was losing as a result. There was a rumour circulating at one stage that Instagram (and some of the other social media platforms) were / are going to crack down on third party linking platforms in the future as part of their “verified user” programs – meaning that ONLY links to the domain registered to the account will be allowable in the profiles. This IS only a rumour as far as I know but “where there is smoke, there is fire” – so I figured why take the chance?
For the same cost (or less) than what many of these services charge for their “Pro” versions (for example Linktree charges $6 a month), you could buy your own domain name with simple hosting (don’t ask me where – just google it) and you could replicate pretty much the exact same functionality yourself – AND you’d have your own website to do so much more with (like write blogs like this one to help others??).
The steps are simple really:-
- Install WordPress (or whatever CMS you are comfortable with)
- Create a blank page and call it something relevant (I’ve called mine “linkmenu” – yes, not very original I know but people understand what it is)
- Style the page as you want it
- I’d suggest keeping it as light and simple as possible to load fast
- add links with separators or put them in a table
- be sure to centre the text as that’s the common convention and looks best on mobile
- add your brand colours / whatever you want to do
- Hook up your site to Google Analytics (all for free) if you haven’t already and make sure the page is indexed by google
Voila – you’re done!
Your Google Analytics will give you all the stats you need – source / referrer / links clicked and if you are linking to your own internal landing pages you will be able to track complete user journeys and conversions etc – exactly what you need to know to constantly change up your strategy!
NOW – every single “link in bio” click will be tracked and of course there is no limit to the number of affiliate links (often restricted on free plans) or tracking tags or anything else you want to add as it’s YOUR page under YOUR control!
Check out my Instagram profile here to see my (very simple) implementation in action – it took me all of 5 minutes to set up!!
Now get going on yours!
(yeah – I know – I’m “losing valuable traffic” with this post as there is NO “call to action” and NO “signup to my email list” – that’s because sometimes, it’s just better to “pay-it-forward” in life – enjoy the free tips but feel free to check out my merch while you’re here 😜)
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