The link in bio for freelancers

A prospective client arriving from social has about fifteen seconds of interest and one question: do they do the kind of thing I need, and are they available. A portfolio answers the first question slowly and the second one not at all.

Three pieces of work and one sentence about what you currently take on outperforms a full portfolio for exactly this traffic, because this traffic is deciding whether to bother, not evaluating a shortlist.

These are the blocks link2l.ink offers freelancers and service businesses first, in the order it offers them. The editor puts this set in front of you when you pick your line of work, so the page below is what you get rather than a template you have to assemble.

1. 1Gallery block

   Three recent pieces, the ones closest to the work you want more of

   Three is enough to establish range and few enough to be looked at. The pieces you show determine the work you get asked for, so show the work you want.

2. 2Offer block

   What you take on, and whether you are open right now

   Availability is the question every enquiry starts with. Answering it before it is asked removes the most common reason people do not write.

3. 3Email capture block

   A short enquiry form: what, when, roughly what budget

   A form gets you a usable brief. A mailto link gets you "hey, are you free?" and three days of back and forth.

4. 4Link block

   The full portfolio and the professional profile, for the people who want depth

   Some enquiries do want to see everything. They will scroll. Most will not, and the page should not be built for the minority.

Why the order is the whole argument

Almost nobody in this category is missing a block. The tour dates, the newsletter, the booking link: they are on the page. They are just below three things that get fewer clicks, and every visitor pays for that. Ordering is the cheapest improvement available to most pages and the one nobody makes, because making it by hand means noticing something changed.

Freelance bio pages get low volume and high value: a handful of visits a week, one of which might be a month of work. That makes averages useless and individual behaviour interesting.

The most useful thing the ordering tends to surface is which piece of work people actually click. It is very often not the piece you are proudest of, and it is a direct signal about the work the market wants from you rather than the work you want to be known for.

Referrer-level ordering matters here more than most: traffic from a design community and traffic from a client’s referral behave completely differently, and the second kind is already sold and just wants the enquiry form.

The mechanics are the same for everybody and are written up in full on the adaptive link in bio page: recent clicks count more than old ones, a rate measured on a handful of views is pulled hard toward the average so a single tap cannot rearrange anything, and nothing reorders at all until there is enough traffic for the ordering to mean something.

• A raw mailto link. It opens an empty email and most people close it. A short form with three fields gets you a brief you can quote from.
• Not saying whether you are available. It is the first thing a client wants to know and it is almost never on the page. One line, updated when it changes.
• Showing your favourite work instead of your sellable work. The portfolio you are proudest of and the portfolio that gets you hired are rarely the same. The bio page should be the second one.

If you want the general version of this rather than the one for freelancers and service businesses, how many links covers the pruning question and why nobody is clicking works through the diagnosis in order.