What to put in your link in bio.

The short answer.

A freelancer's bio link needs four things: your best work, a one-liner that says what you do and for whom, one-tap contact and a next step for the client who's ready. Work goes first, buttons go last and anything that doesn't help someone hire you comes off the page. The rest of this guide is the reasoning.

The one-glance test.

A potential client opens your bio link on a phone, usually between other things, and gives it one glance before deciding whether to keep going. In that glance they're answering three questions: is the work good, is this person active and how would I get in touch. Everything on the page either helps answer those or gets in the way.

Notice what's missing from those three questions: follower counts, the full CV, the tools you use, your rates. Clients ask about those later, on a call, after the glance has done its filtering. The page's job ends at "I want to talk to this person", and pages that try to finish the whole sale in one scroll mostly just slow the glance down.

Run the test on your own page. Open it cold and count what a stranger learns in five seconds. If the first screen is a stack of identical buttons, the glance ends there. The link-in-bio examples post shows how the test plays out per profession, a photographer's page leads differently than a consultant's, while the pattern underneath stays the same.

The essential four.

Everything else on a working freelancer page is a variation of these four. One framing before the list: think in blocks rather than links. A link points away from your page and hopes for another tap, a block does its job right there, and the strongest pages are mostly blocks.

1. 1

   Your work, four to six pieces

   The best ones, not all of them. A client decides from your strongest work and forgives a short page much faster than a padded one.

2. 2

   One line that says what you do

   What you make and for whom, in the words a client would use. It's the same line as your Instagram bio, and the repetition is a feature: it confirms they're in the right place.

3. 3

   Contact that works in one tap

   An email button or contact card plus the one or two socials you actually answer. If reaching you takes detective work, the warm ones cool off.

4. 4

   A way forward

   Whatever your next step is: a booking link, an availability note like "taking projects from September", a short intro call. If deposits are part of how you work, a private payment block like Folio's Pay-Me can sit here too, payment details behind a password instead of in a DM. A ready client shouldn't have to ask what happens next.

What to cut: the link graveyard.

Most bio pages fail by addition. The podcast episode from 2023, the second Instagram, the store with one sticker in it, the newsletter that quietly stopped, every platform you've ever signed up for. Each link seemed reasonable when it was added, and together they bury the work. The test for every block is blunt: does this help a client hire me? A personal project can stay if it shows range. The graveyard goes.

The usual objection is that some link might matter to somebody, the playlist has fans, the podcast interview was fun. That's true and it doesn't change the call, because this page has one visitor who counts: a client deciding whether to write to you. Give the rest a home somewhere else or nowhere. A bio link is a shop window, and shop windows don't display everything in the building.

A worked example.

The before, a pattern from freelancer pages everywhere: Instagram, TikTok, a Spotify playlist, the podcast interview, a Medium post from two years ago, a coffee-donation link, an old client's site, a booking link and no work anywhere. Nine taps on offer and not one of them shows what this person makes. The client arrived to answer "is the work good" and the page never addresses the question.

The after: four portfolio pieces up top, "Motion designer for music and culture brands" beneath them, an email card, Instagram because that's where the following lives and an availability note. Seven blocks that answer the question in one glance. Nothing about the trimmed version is clever, it just puts the burden of proof on the work instead of on the visitor's patience.

Order by proof.

People read a bio page like a feed, top down with fading attention, so the order is the argument. Work first, because proof earns the rest of the scroll. The one-liner near the top so the work has a frame. Contact where a convinced person expects it, just past the proof. Socials last, since they're for deep-divers who are already sold. A page that leads with buttons asks a stranger to care before showing them a reason, which is backwards on every platform.

The reason buttons-first fails is worth keeping in mind while you arrange things. A button is a promise of content somewhere else, so a stack of them asks the visitor to click through and assemble an impression on their own. Work shown directly makes the impression for them, and every extra tap you ask of a phone visitor loses a share of them along the way.

Instagram, X and LinkedIn send different visitors.

The same link gets tapped in different moods. Instagram traffic has usually seen your grid already, so the page's job is the business layer: the one-liner, contact and the next step. Visitors from X lean toward developers, writers and founders who respond to shipped things, so a GitHub block or strong clips earn a higher slot. LinkedIn arrivals expect a professional read, which gives the positioning line and a testimonial or case study more weight.

None of that means three pages. Proof-first holds everywhere, the nuance is only which proof sits highest, and one honest page beats three half-maintained ones. If you're still choosing the tool for that page, the best link-in-bio tools for freelancers roundup compares the field.

Keep it alive.

A stale page reads as unavailable, which is the one thing a bio link must never say. The maintenance is small: once a month, swap the oldest piece for the newest, check the availability line still tells the truth and tap every link to confirm it resolves. Five minutes, and because it's one live page, every bio you've ever pasted it into updates at once. If most of your clients arrive through Instagram, pair this with the getting clients from Instagram playbook, the two work as a set.

Questions