When Linktree first came about, I was straight up giddy! There would now be space in my Instagram bio for me to share my blog, shops, social media, and whatever else I wanted in one convenient little place. I didn’t LOVE that I would have had to pay for a theme (colors, basically) that better matched my blog, but that was just a little thing.
When I asked my girl Roxanne how she got her theme so perfect, she told me that it wasn’t actually Linktree but it was a page from her own blog, so that she wouldn’t lose her SEO. I had not even thought of that! That was another feature you could pay for on Linktree, but I’m just savvy enough that I could make my own page, fo’ free, and have the same results.
Now, I’m not saying Linktree is all bad. Not at all. It’s a fantastic idea and tbh, even their paid option is a totally fair price. (For those who are interested, here’s a comparison of what you can get from Linktree for free vs. their paid plan.)Â What I am saying is with a little creativity and some time, you can come up with your own landing page to link on your Instagram or wherever else you need it that matches your brand perfectly!
Bloom where you are planted
My Instagram landing page has gone through a couple of makeovers. I’m not going to lie, the first link page I did I kind of slapped together with some cutie buttons and left it at that. I’m much happier with the way that it looks now:
I do all of my photo editing/ graphic making in Picmonkey, and it was so easy to make my “glitter” buttons using my blog design kit by BLOGPIXIE. Once I liked how the first button looked, I saved and then just changed the wording so the font size and placement on top of the “glitter” stayed exactly the same.
Now, one thing that Linktree has that I don’t really is the ease of changing what all is listed in my links, unless I want to keep adding and deleting buttons. That’s why I have “Featured On The ‘Gram” so I can link whatever I want without the title being too specific.
If you’re familiar at all with WordPress, it’s actually super easy to set up. Just create a new page, insert your buttons, and link them to where you want them to go. I named mine “links” because it’s actually been studied that folks are more likely to click on a link that they know where it’s going. Basically, and I think you’ll agree,  http://thecarolove.com/links is more appealing than  https://bit.ly/2JxIM8K. Once my page was created and published, I skipped the step of adding it to my pages menu (where I have my about, shop, etc), effectively making it hidden except for in my Instagram profile.
I recently discovered on my Pages dashboard that I could actually change the page type from “Default Template” to “Landing Page” taking away the sidebar, header, etc. 
I also no longer have my sharing buttons visible on that page. You can turn that option on and off if you open the page editor. This all just makes it look very clean so that readers will only see the links you’ve curated- no distractions!
Be sure to test all of your buttons once they go live! For some reason, I was having an issue with Brandless + thredUP links switching. It works now, but that would have been frustrating as a reader if the buttons didn’t work.
Back to SEO for a second. I just wanted to show you how much of my traffic is driven from Instagram:
It’s about 66% of my traffic came from Instagram that day! Moral of the story- don’t ignore Instagram as a tool to grow your readership, not just your following! That and you can totally do it by yourself!
Please let me know if you have any questions as I always feel self conscious that my instructional posts are super rambles and confusing. I also have a question for you- I did not add my social networking as buttons. Was this a mistake? Or can you get to those easily enough from my blog page? Thanks in advance!
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