What to put in your link in bio when you write a newsletter

Someone reads a sharp thread of yours on a train, taps through to your profile, and sees a bio link that says "my newsletter." They don't know what it covers, how often it lands, or whether it costs money. They have about one stop of battery and attention left, so they go back to scrolling.

Your newsletter already has a home, whether that's Substack, beehiiv, Ghost or your own site. The job of your bio link is smaller than that. It has to answer three questions in a few seconds: what is this, is it for me, and where do I sign up.

Lead with one subscribe button

Put a single subscribe link at the top of the page and give it a label that says what the reader gets. "Subscribe to The Weekly Margin" is fine. "Get one essay on freelance pricing every Thursday" is better, because it names the topic and the rhythm in the button itself.

Point it at your newsletter's subscribe page, not your archive or your homepage. Every extra tap between the bio and the email field loses some people.

If you publish on Substack, the platform now shows where subscribers come from. Its growth chart, announced on September 12, 2025, breaks growth down by source, including outside platforms like Instagram and Google search. That's useful for a simple reason. If you can see Instagram traffic turning into subscribers, you know the subscribe button is worth polishing. If you can't, you know where to look first.

Write one line that says who the newsletter is for

A tagline does more work than a logo. State the topic, the reader and the rhythm in one sentence: "A weekly letter for first-time landlords on repairs, tenants and tax." Put it right under the subscribe button, in the text block or the header bio.

Skip the adjectives. "Thoughtful, curated insights" describes every newsletter and so describes none. A specific promise filters out the wrong readers, and the right ones tend to subscribe faster once they see themselves in it.

A few things belong in that line or next to it:

• How often it arrives. "Every Thursday" tells people what they're agreeing to.
• Whether it's free. If a paid tier exists, say that the free version is the default.
• A rough reading time. "Five minutes" lowers the cost of saying yes.

Show a taste of the writing

A subscribe button asks for trust, and an email address is a real thing to give a stranger. Give them something to read first.

Add one link to your best or most representative issue, labelled with its actual headline. Pick the piece that best shows the newsletter's angle, not the one that did best on social. If your most-shared essay is a one-off rant and the newsletter is a calm weekly explainer, the rant sets the wrong expectation.

One link is enough. Three "popular issues" turns your page into an archive, and the reader has to choose again. Rotate the link when a better issue comes along, and check it every month or so. A stale "latest issue" from last spring tells visitors the newsletter has gone quiet.

Make room for your other work, but rank it

Most writers do more than one thing. You might have a book, a podcast, a course, a consulting inbox or a Bluesky account you'd like people to follow. Those belong on the page, below the subscribe button.

Instagram lets you add up to five links to a profile, a change announced in April 2023, but the bio shows only a count until someone taps. That makes the order inside your own page matter more than the order of those five. If you are weighing how many to keep, the learn page on how many links you should have gives a short answer, and the short answer is fewer than you think.

A sensible order for a writer:

1. Subscribe to the newsletter
2. One representative issue
3. The thing you sell (a book, a course, a paid tier)
4. Where else to find you

Anything that doesn't earn a place in that list can live on your website. If you're unsure whether you need one at all, there's a short answer on that too.

Decide where the email address gets collected

There are two honest ways to run the signup, and the right one depends on how much you value owning the list.

Send people to your newsletter platform. This is the default and the simplest. The reader lands on your Substack or beehiiv page, enters an email, and you're done. Nothing to export, nothing to import.

Collect the address on your bio page first. On Linky, the Form block holds up to 10 fields, including an email field, and you can view submissions in Linky and export them as CSV. That suits a launch, a waitlist for a newsletter that hasn't started, or a gated extra like a free reading list. Linky doesn't send email, so you'd import the CSV into your newsletter tool yourself. If you want the longer version of that approach, the post on growing your email list from your link in bio covers it.

For an existing newsletter, the first option is nearly always better. The second earns its place before launch, or when you want to capture interest in a new project that has no platform page yet.

A worked example

Say you write a fortnightly newsletter about small-town restaurants, with about 1,500 subscribers and a self-published guidebook. This example is invented, but it shows the shape.

Your bio page, top to bottom:

1. Header: your name and the line "Fortnightly dispatches from small-town restaurants worth the drive."
2. Subscribe link: "Get the next dispatch, free, every other Friday."
3. Representative issue: "Read the one about the diner that serves breakfast until 4pm."
4. Guidebook: "The guidebook, 120 restaurants across 9 states."
5. Text block: a two-line note on where you're travelling next, which you update after each trip.

That's five blocks, which fits on Linky's Free plan (one page, up to five blocks, plus the header every page has). Nothing on it asks the reader to make a decision between two equal options. The top asks for an email, and the rest rewards the people who scroll.

If you wanted to go further, you could add a Latest Instagram post block so the page shows your newest photo without an edit. That works for a food writer. For a newsletter about tax, it would be clutter, so leave it off.

Keep track of what works without per-link numbers

Linky doesn't count clicks on individual links, so you won't see which button got tapped. Premium analytics show page views, unique visitors and top locations over the last seven days. That tells you whether your bio traffic is rising, but not which block drove it.

For the signup itself, use your newsletter platform's own numbers. Check how many new subscribers arrive in the week after you change the page, and change one thing at a time. If you rewrite the tagline and swap the featured issue on the same day, you won't know which one helped.

Put it together this afternoon

Open your bio page and ask whether a stranger could say what your newsletter covers, how often it comes, and where to subscribe, in the time it takes to read the top of the screen. If not, rewrite the button label and the tagline first. Those two changes matter more than any theme or font.

You can build the whole page on Linky in a few minutes, and there's more on what suits writers if you want a starting point.