How to Roll Your Own Linktree Link Landing Page and Control Your Brand

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.

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.

  1. Bought Anglotopia.link – I bought my brand name with the .LINK gTLD. It cost like $5 with Blacknight (my primary domain registrar now).
  2. Pointed it at my server.
  3. Installed a clean WordPress install with Softaculous.
  4. Installed Genesis and the Genesis Sample Themes.
  5. Switched to the Landing Page template in Genesis for the homepage.
  6. Installed Atomic Blocks and Kadence Blocks plugins.
  7. Created a block of buttons, customized them to how I wanted it to look.
  8. Installed Google custom fonts (I use Lato)
  9. Installed an SSL
  10. Installed Matomo Analytics
  11. 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.

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