The Junk Drawer with a URL: BODIES & BOTS #8

I’ve been building brands since the 1980s.

theONswitch, my marketing company, has been doing it since 2003.

I’ve helped hundreds of companies figure out who they are, where to show up, and what to say when they get there.

And I hadn’t looked at my own digital junk drawer in months.

Not because I forgot. Because I was busy thinking at altitude. Which is a generous way of saying the details slipped. Which, in marketing, is how every avoidable disaster starts.

A $1.3 Billion Workaround

In 2016, two frustrated founders built Linktree in a single weekend because Instagram wouldn’t allow more than one link in a bio. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

A workaround for an annoyance is now valued at $1.3 billion.

Which tells you something important about where attention actually lives. Not on your website. Not in your carefully art-directed brand deck. In a little link page that most of us set up once and never touch again.

In 2025, your link-in-bio is how the world decides who you are in three seconds or less. Cognitive scientists call this thin-slicing. Malcolm Gladwell called it Blink. Your visitors are doing it whether you designed for it or not.

A few numbers worth sitting with:

• The average visitor spends less than 3 seconds deciding whether to click anything on a landing page. Your top link is doing most of the work.
• Link-in-bio pages with a single clear call to action convert at up to 3x the rate of pages with 10 or more undifferentiated links.
• Linktree alone has over 50 million users. Competitors like Beacons and Carrd are growing fast. The link page is not a trend. It’s infrastructure.

Most of us didn’t design for any of that. We accumulated for it.

Why I Have Two Trees

theONswitch is my marketing company. NANCYAF is my alter ego. Two audiences, two voices, two purposes. Two Linktrees to match.

And here’s something worth knowing: don’t assume your business audience can’t find your personal stuff. We’re living in a world with no secrets. They will find it. The only question is whether what they find is intentional or accidental. I’d rather curate both than pretend one doesn’t exist.

The built-in tracking also tells me exactly what people find compelling enough to click, so I can adjust my marketing accordingly.

The strategy was sound. The execution was a junk drawer.

What AI Sees That You Can’t

You know that person in every meeting who identifies every single problem with complete confidence and then has absolutely nothing useful to offer when it’s time to actually fix anything? Brilliant spotter. Useless doer. Completely certain of their own genius.

AI is that person.

I handed an AI both of my Linktree URLs and asked for a real audit. Not encouragement. A real one. Five minutes later, it found four things I had completely missed:

• A broken thumbnail displaying the wrong image entirely. My visitors saw it. I didn’t.
• A social icon sending people to the wrong brand. Small error. Real confusion.
• Both pages telling nearly the same story in the same order. Two pages with an identity crisis aren’t two pages. They’re one page, wasting everyone’s time.
• My most powerful content was buried at the bottom. Whatever converts a cold visitor fastest belongs at the top. Always.

I was grateful. And then mildly irritated. Because once it handed me the list, it just… stared at me. Cleaning up the junk drawer? That was apparently my job.

And for the record: I had trusted actual humans, social media agencies, and freelancers to help manage these pages. They hadn’t noticed any of it either. So the AI wasn’t just faster than doing it myself. It was more thorough than the people I had paid to do it.

Which is the part nobody tells you about AI. It sees everything. It does not do everything. You still need to be the adult in the room.

What To Actually Do

If you have a link page, look at it right now. As a stranger. Then ask yourself:

• Does someone who’s never heard of you know within three seconds who you are and what you want them to do?
• Is every link going where you think it’s going? Click them. All of them.
• Are your thumbnails displaying correctly?
• If you have more than one online presence, is each one telling a genuinely different story… or just the same story in different outfits?
• Is your most powerful content at the top? Not your favorite. Your most powerful.

And if you don’t have one yet, ask yourself why not. Then fix that first.

Then hand it to an AI and ask for a real audit. It takes five minutes. It costs nothing. It will tell you exactly what a stranger sees.

Just don’t expect it to help you clean it up afterward.

Before you audit your own, go look at mine. See if you spot anything I missed.

• theONswitch is my business brand
• NANCYAF is the personal brand.

The Numbers Don’t Lie (But Your Link Page Might)

1. Linktree has over 50 million users across 200 countries. It is the 8th most-visited website in the world. That little link page isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s infrastructure.
2. The average human attention span online is now 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000. Your entire brand story has to land faster than it takes to read this sentence.
3. Landing pages with a single call to action convert at up to 3x the rate of pages with 10 or more links. More is not more.
4. 94% of first impressions are design-related. A broken image or mismatched thumbnail isn’t a minor glitch. It’s your first impression.
5. Businesses that conduct regular digital audits are 2x more likely to report strong brand consistency across channels. Most never do a single one.
6. AI-assisted content audits can reduce review time by up to 70% compared to manual processes. Five minutes is not an exaggeration.