What to put in your link in bio (and in what order)

The best description of the job came from a comment on Hacker News.

The entire point of linktree is to make people quickly bounce to somewhere else. If you start adding reasons for people to stay on linktree instead of leaving and going to your other sites, you are making it fail.

Your page is a signpost. Signposts get read at walking speed.

Start from the one thing you want to happen this month

Pick one outcome and write it down in a sentence before you touch the page: the workshop fills, the newsletter grows, the shop sells the new print, the calendar gets three bookings. From there the order of the links is a question with an answer instead of a matter of taste.

A layout that works for most people

1. The thing that expires. The show, the launch, the deadline, the open enrolment. It goes first and it comes off the day it ends. A dead promo at the top of the page is worse than an empty slot.
2. The thing you are known for. Portfolio, shop, latest release, the piece that made people look you up. Whoever arrived from a stranger’s repost lands here.
3. The durable set. Two or three rows that are true all year: the store, the booking calendar, the podcast, the press kit.
4. A way to reach you that is not a platform. An email capture field or a contact link. This is the only row that still works if an app changes its rules.

That is four to seven rows. If your list is at fifteen, the bottom eight are doing nothing except making the top four harder to find. Archive them instead of deleting them, so you can bring one back when it becomes relevant.

Label the outcome, not the destination

A row that says "Shop" asks the reader to imagine what is in it. A row that says what is in it does not. The same swap works everywhere.

Keep labels under about forty characters so they stay on one line on a phone. Two-line rows halve how many the reader sees before scrolling.

What to leave off

• Links to the profile the reader just came from. They know where Instagram is.
• Anything you would not tap yourself at a bus stop.
• Six social icons for accounts you have not posted to since 2023. Two live ones beat six dormant ones.
• A wall of text about your philosophy. If it needs a paragraph, it needs its own page, and the page needs its own row.

Do not replace the bio link with a one-off promo

It is tempting: the launch is the priority this week, so the profile link points straight at the launch. Then the launch ends, and for however long it takes you to notice, every person who found you from an old post hits a closed page. Point the profile at your bio page permanently and change what is inside it. The profile link is the one address on a platform that you control, and swapping it costs you everything else that was behind it.

Check it the way it will actually be seen

Open the page on a phone, at arm’s length, with one thumb, outdoors if you can. Count how many rows are visible before you scroll. That number is your page for most visitors. Then hand the phone to somebody who does not know what you do and ask them what you sell. If they hesitate, the top two rows are wrong.

Then let the numbers reorder it

After a month, look at clicks per row. The usual surprise is that the row you put third gets most of the taps and the one you agonised over gets four. Move the popular row up, rewrite the label of the one that failed, and check again next month. Two rounds of that is worth more than any amount of planning. If you cannot see per-row numbers on your current tool, that is a fixable problem.