If you look at social media these days, especially Instagram, you’ll soon be convinced that you need a Linktree page and a QR code for your website. All the cool kids have them.

Sadly, many of the people who fall for the fad find themselves trapped in a costly and not very useful third-party service. And worse than the expense, these service are nothing but a barrier between you and your customers and friends, from which the services profit by selling activity or showing ads (or both).

Fortunately, QR codes and “linking pages” are easy to construct with very little effort, and no expense. In my opinion, you should “roll your own” instead of signing up for one of these services.

Here’s a real-world nightmare scenario: A friend of mine signed up for one of the “free” QR code services, and had the code printed on thousands of postcards that advertise his show. What he didn’t realize is that the free service was limited, and soon after publication, his code stopped working unless he paid hundreds of dollars a month to reactive it. Now he has a thousand postcards that send his customers, not to his website, but to an extortive third-party.

Make your own QR Code

It’s easy to make a QR Code that points directly to your website.

The simple way is to by going to DuckDuckGo.com, and entering into the search field something like “qr https://gordonmeyer.com”. The first result will be a QR that you can save and distribute.

A fancier way is to use the Shortcuts app on macOS or iOS. There’s a built-in Generate QR Code action that you can add to any workflow.

Make your own linking page

You probably already subscribe to a service that lets you share documents that can contain links, via the web. For example, iCloud, Dropbox, Craft, Microsoft Word, or Google Docs. Below is an elementary example; you can get as fancy with this as your time and talent allow. Once you’re finished, share your page as a public read-only document, and use that link in your social media profiles.

What do you lose?

So, you might be asking yourself, what are the disadvantages of using these methods? What you lose is that you won’t get the usage statistics that the third-party services offer (to those who pay extra). So you won’t know how many times your links were clicked, or how they came to your page, such as via Instagram versus Facebook versus Blue Sky.

However, as a small, independent creator, do you really care? Unless you’re engaged in a fancy marketing campaign, none of that information is actionable. It’s interesting to see, for certain, but that’s about it. I could also argue that not getting the measurements frees your psyche to worry about things that actually help your business or social life.