I’ve been using Linktree for a while now as my primary link on Instagram. For those that don’t know what it is – since Instagram only allows links in your profile, the trend is to have a landing page full of relevant links in your profile. Linktree is probably the ‘biggest’ of the link page services. I’ve used it for a while and honestly, it’s great.
Yes! The linktree on someone else's website is madness. Do like Melanie: https://t.co/kQ9yy080TA
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) August 22, 2020
But I read this tweet the other day that gave me pause. Why are large Instagrammers trusting their important branding to a third party? Look, there’s nothing wrong with Linktree. But as someone with a large following and an established brand, this resonated with me – I should have my own branded link page, that sells me – not someone else. Linktree offers white label branding, but it costs money. I also want analytics, which Linktree charges for.
I’m not one to do something that costs money when I can do it myself for free.
I already have a dedicated server with Blacknight. It has plenty of capacity and could easily support a 1-page website that only hosts links. It just has to look nice.
So, here’s what I did to set one up.
- Bought Anglotopia.link – I bought my brand name with the .LINK gTLD. It cost like $5 with Blacknight (my primary domain registrar now).
- Pointed it at my server.
- Installed a clean WordPress install with Softaculous.
- Installed Genesis and the Genesis Sample Themes.
- Switched to the Landing Page template in Genesis for the homepage.
- Installed Atomic Blocks and Kadence Blocks plugins.
- Created a block of buttons, customized them to how I wanted it to look.
- Installed Google custom fonts (I use Lato)
- Installed an SSL
- Installed Matomo Analytics
- Installed WPSupercache12. Set up all the links, added a background, added my logo, and social media icons.
And this is the end result – check out here – for best results, load it on your mobile: https://anglotopia.link
A simple one-page landing page that does one thing, show links to the stuff I mention on my Instagram account. With Gutenberg blocks, it’s a little more flexible and I can add new features as needed. I now have free analytics and can see how each link does. And, I must say – it looks rather nice. It has my logo and my stock image I use for most of our marketing. When you load it on a mobile phone, it looks great. The page is easy to update and I can easily add new links for each new marketing campaign that comes down the line.
There was a bit trial and error before I settled on this approach. But once I got things set up, it took about an hour to have a finished landing page. It’s certainly wasn’t as easy at setting up a Linktree. But now I control every aspect of it and it cost me nothing more than a new domain and an hour of my weekend.