You Ask, I Answer: Link in Bio Solutions for Instagram?

In today's episode, Jake asks, what's your favorite Instagram Link in bio platform? I tried Linktree for a while, and it seems like uh Instagram is starting to crack down on things like that. Generally speaking, for simple services where there's relatively low complexity, you're better off having your own. You're better off having your own service that is under your control that you can tune and do uh as little or as much with as you like, and is not reliant on the third party. One of the great challenges we face in marketing right now is the crazy explosion of point solutions for pretty much everything.

Uh my friend Scott Brinker creates this landscape called the Martech 5000, was named that three years ago when it had 5,000 different marketing technology solutions. This year, 8,000. Among them things like, you know, the various link in bio solutions. Which is fine, but it always increases the complexity of your marketing technology stack. If you can, if you have the capability, try rolling your own.

Try building infrastructure that you have control of uh if you have the capability to do so. It reduces your costs. Um critically, for basic stuff, it you don't have to worry about a service provider vanishing overnight and then you having to scramble to fix a bunch of things, right? Nor do you have to worry about uh a service provider saying, well, you know what? We're gonna increase the cost 10x now.

Uh which has happened to me. I had one provider that went from uh $25 a month for a particular technology service to $500 a month. And they said, Oh, yeah, we're doing this because uh, you know, whatever their reason was. And you know, it's fine. It's their rights, their software, they have the the right to do that.

I have the right to not be their customer, and I'm like, all right, I'm going to uh a different solution, I'm going to an open source solution that uh I you know I host on my own servers because I don't want to pay that much money for this particular service. Uh same with uh a link shortener. Uh I was doing some work with uh a popular link shortening platform and it the pricing on it just went through the roof. And I was like, hmm, you know what? I'm gonna use an open source package and and run my own server, and then I don't have to pay any money other than the the hosting for the server, and I can do as much as I want, and there's no limits.

So that is the approach I try to take whenever it is practical to do so. If there are either pieces of code you can write yourself or open source packages that you can uh swap in for proprietary packages, you will save your company a lot of money, and you will uh give yourself the reassurance that the service, the function is one that is under your control. So let's look at the Instagram Link and Bio version. I'm gonna bring um switches over here. This is a very simple piece of code, and all it is is it has the URL that you change for the link in bio, and then some Google Analytics tags, because one of the things that people like about services like you know, the link tree is the world is they get analytics on it.

Well, I I like analytics too. I like analytics more if it's in an interface that everyone's familiar with, like Google Analytics. So in this case I have it set up so that it sends essentially uh link click data to my Google Analytics install so that I can go in and look and see, you know, uh track with the uh sources, the mediums, the campaign codes, and I don't have to append that to the URL. And then it does the thing and sends it off to Instagram. What does it look like?

What does the code actually look like? The link and bio part that is the link on Instagram is one URL on the web server, and then it goes to a page that looks like this, where for those of you who use Linktree, it looks real simple, right? This is just a WordPress page, it's just a a page on the company website, nothing fancy, nothing special, uh just got a little bit of styling to make it look like a Linktree, and it works great. It gets people exactly where I want them. And this is a page that you can maintain in WordPress.

So if this is going to be like the permanent page on your link on your your uh Linkin bio, then guess what? This this fulfills the function. So if you don't care about the the virtual clicks on uh the Instagram link itself, put a page like this on your WordPress install, right? Style it a little bit, and then use this as your LinkedIn bio, and then it's just another page you maintain on your website. It keeps things simple, it keeps things clean, it is under your control, and if you're as long as your template is responsive like this one here, uh it makes it so easy for people to find the resources that you want them to have.

And bonus, if it's a regular web page that's responsive, you can change other parts of this. You can do A-B testing on it, you can do a bunch of things that you can't do with Linktree. Right? You can't A B test different offers on Linktree. You can't swap around the order of the buttons and do all these things, or if you can, I don't I've used Linktree once.

Um I don't know if these are paid features or not, but why pay? It's a web page that you run on your website, you use Google Optimize to do the A-B testing, and now you've got all the marketing technology facilities you could possibly want on a web page. You have your Google Analytics running on here so you can see the traffic to this page. Uh you have Google Optimize for A B testing. You have Google Tag Manager so you can track and cookie and run campaigns and promotions to this page.

You could use this page uh in your Facebook ads. Keep it simple. Keep things as simple as possible. That's the solution I recommend. When and where possible, keep it in-house, even if it is nothing more than a simple web page, and do it yourself.

Now that link redirector that I was talking about is not an essential part. You can just have the page itself, and that's the link that goes in your bio. And you just adjust this as you need to. Uh if you want the link redirector for the extra analytics, you know that's something else you have to code, but it's not a deal breaker, right? And it's just additional data.

So that's the solution I would recommend. Are there other services that do what Link Tree does? Yes, of course there are. Uh do you need to pay them? I personally don't think so.

So if you have follow-up questions about this, uh feel free to ask in the comments box below. But again, keep it simple. Use your existing content platform. What makes this page useful is it's just a bunch of CSS. It's just, you know, standard design stuff.

Nothing fancy, no uh additional plugins. You can just put it right in the HTML on your webpage, and it looks great. Uh as always, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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