Create a Beautiful Bio Link for Instagram
We love Instagram. It's a great way to share links to our shop and our blog posts. I go through phases of blogging... a lot. With lots of links, my Linktree was getting long and looked a bit (dare I say) boring. So I set about finding a way to create a beautiful bio link for Instagram. And I landed on Lnk.bio.
What is a Bio Link?
A Bio Link is the part of your profile (in this case, on Instagram) that contains a link to your website. This is designed to help your followers to find out more about an image you've posted.
Sharing a direct link to blog posts and products on Facebook and LinkedIn is straightforward, you just share the link in your update. Instagram is different. It is primarily a photograph and video platform which doesn't allow links in posts. If you've noticed 'swipe up' posts which allow readers to click on a link, they can work really well. But you need a lot of followers to access that functionality. For small accounts, the only link you can have is a link in the 'bio' part of your profile which describes who you are.
What's the problem with just one Bio link?
A simple bio link to your shop or website is fine, until people want to find the post you've talked about, the recipe you mention or the product in your image. A simple link to your website means they have to then search all over your website to find 'the thing' they just saw in their Instagram feed. A handful of dedicated followers may do that, most don't. They just take a quick look around and give up.
This means not only did the person not find what they were looking for, but lots of people visiting your site briefly and leaving quickly is bad news for your bounce rate. Your bounce rate tells you (and Google) the percentage of people who arrive on your website and then leave without visiting any other pages. You can find your bounce rate data in your Google Analytics account, which I won't go into here. But in short: the higher the bounce rate, the worse news it is. For example, if you have an average bounce rate of 80%, this means 80% of the people who visit your website leave having only viewed the page they landed on. If you say 'link in bio' in your Instagram posts but only have a link to your homepage, you may have a lot of people clicking on that link then leaving immediately, because they don't have time or can't be bothered to find what they were looking for. To Google, high bounce rates means you're not giving your customers what they're looking for, and/or your web pages are of a low quality. You will be marked down by Google accordingly which isn't good for your site's Google rank.
What you really need is a link to a page containing the links you're talking about, so the reader can just click on the relevant link and be taken straight to where they want to go. There are a few of these, the best known being Linktree.
What about having a Linktree account?
Linktree is fab, I used it for years. But my Linktree was getting a bit crowded with lots and lots of links, and I wanted something that looked more interesting and, frankly, prettier. I did have in mind to work out how to create such a thing in Linktree, I'm guessing it's absolutely possible. I also contemplated making a bespoke landing page on our website so I could design what I wanted in my head. I vaguely thought about these things for months but never got around to sorting anything out. Then, by chance, I discovered a different option. Lnk.bio.
Create a Beautiful Bio Link for Instagram
Lnk.bio is an alternative way to create a link in your bio which gives more information than just taking the visitor to your home page. I was able to create what was in my head in my bio, and I did it in about 15 minutes flat in Lnk.bio's grid layout which mirrors the Instagram look and feel. It looks beautiful on a phone and on a pc, slightly different in each case. This is what my profile looks like today:
On a phone
and on a pc
Are we noticing any difference?
Absolutely we are noticing a difference in the amount of traffic to our blog posts on the website. I know I am attracted more to an image than a simple link, it seems I'm not alone! If you have a paid account, you can see your stats and how many people have clicked through on your links.
What does it cost?
You can have a free lnk.bio profile with unlimited links, but that wouldn't have allowed me to create this look with all the images. The minimum for a paid account is $0.99 per month. I signed up to lifetime access which, at the time of writing this, was $25.99 for access to everything. There is a lower-priced life option too which didn't have all the functionality that I wanted.
Lnk.bio also provide a QR code to my profile which we can put on the bottom of emails and in the shop window. Customers simply hold their phone camera over the QR code and then click on the link to take them to our page showing tempting images of our blog posts and a link to our shop.
So there you go. All about my new, very favourite thing to help drive visitors to our webshop and our blog posts. Do you use this tool, or do you use something else which you would recommend to other shop owners and/or blog writers?
My posts usually contain links to our webshop and/or affiliate links to other shops. If you click on them, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Find our disclosure policy here.
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