The one-link problem, in Ethiopian terms
You are a creator in Addis, Hawassa, Mekelle, Bahir Dar or anywhere else with a phone and an audience. You probably have:
- a TikTok or Instagram account where people find you;
- a Telegram channel where you actually talk to customers;
- a shop, a Google Form, or a phone number where orders happen;
- a YouTube channel or a second account for a different content style.
The bio field on those platforms accepts exactly one URL. So creators do the same thing everywhere: they paste their Telegram link, and their shop, video and contact details are effectively invisible. Or they swap the link every week and lose whatever the old link was doing.
A creator page fixes that. Instead of one destination, the single link in your bio opens a small page with your photo, your name, a line about you, and a list of buttons — one per destination. Every button is its own short link, so you can see which one people actually tap.
What an EthioLink Creator Page is
It is a second feature on the account you already have. There is no separate signup, no separate login and no separate bill: you sign in at short.et/login, open the Creator Page tab, and the page belongs to the same account that holds your short links.
When you add a destination to your page — a YouTube channel, a product page, a Telegram invite — EthioLink shortens it for you. If you paste https://youtube.com/@yourname, you get a short link like short.et/yt-yourname. You never have to create the short link yourself, and the page itself is served by EthioLink, not by a third-party widget.
That design decision matters more than it sounds:
- Every tap is measured. A tap on your page is recorded in creator analytics, and it also counts as a click on that short link — so the same click shows up in the link statistics you already use.
- Every shared link is branded. When somebody copies a link from your page, they share
short.et/…, not a long tracking URL from another company. - Your page stays yours. Your links live in your EthioLink dashboard, and you can edit or hide any of them without touching your bio on Instagram again.
Setting it up: about ten minutes
- Sign in and open the Creator Page tab. From your dashboard, choose Creator Page. It is available on every plan, including Free.
- Claim your username. This becomes your address: pick something you can say out loud and that people can copy from a poster — for example
short.et/abebe. Lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens; four characters minimum. Names that belong to the service itself (admin,login,api,blogand similar) are reserved, and a name already used by another short link cannot be taken. - Add your avatar. Upload an SVG or a PNG up to 200 KB (PNG at most 512×512). EthioLink sanitises images on upload, so anything scripted is stripped before the file is stored.
- Write the two lines that matter. A display name and a short bio. Say what you do and who you do it for. Both languages work; a bilingual bio is normal here.
- Add your links. Paste the destination, give it a title your audience will understand, and optionally add a subtitle and a short icon. Repeat for each destination — the order you set is the order visitors see. On the Free plan you can keep 5 creator links, Starter allows 10, and Business and Enterprise have no creator-link limit.
- Pick a theme. Default is a light page with EthioLink green; Dark is the dark version; Sunset is a warm gradient; Minimal removes borders for a plain look. Free includes the default theme, Starter adds Dark, and Business and Enterprise get all four.
- Publish. Nothing is public until you press publish, so you can build the page in private and preview it as often as you like.
When you are done, put short.et/yourname in the one link field on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. That is the last time you need to edit a bio for a while.
What your visitors see
A visitor lands on a centered, mobile-first page: your avatar in a circle, your name in large type, your bio underneath, then your links as cards with an icon, a title and an optional subtitle. Contact and social icons appear at the top if your plan includes them — social icons and the “Contact me” button are part of Business and Enterprise, together with a public email that anyone can tap.
The page works on any phone, respects the visitor's system preference for dark or light mode, and ends with a small footer that says Made with EthioLink and links back home. It is a subtle thing, but it means every page your audience visits also shows where it came from.
If you unpublish, visitors get a short “temporarily unavailable” notice instead of your links, and you keep editing. If someone types an address that nobody has claimed, they get a friendly page suggesting they create their own — which is how a mistyped link becomes a new account rather than a dead end.
Your links are short links
Each card on your page points at a short code, and the visitor is redirected from there to the destination. Two details are worth knowing:
Codes come from the destination. If you paste a YouTube channel, EthioLink proposes a code with a yt- prefix; Instagram gets ig-, TikTok tt-, Telegram tg-, Facebook fb-, X x-. If the code is taken, a numbered variant is used; if you add the same destination twice, the existing code is reused.
Changing a destination does not break old links. When you point a card at a new URL, a new short code is issued for it, and the old code is retired rather than deleted: copies that are already shared keep redirecting for a grace period, so a link in a story or a printed flyer does not die the moment you edit a card. After that grace period the retired link stops working, which is why it is worth reposting your page link rather than individual buttons.
Reading the clicks
The creator analytics page answers questions you can act on:
- How many people tapped, and how many were different people? Total clicks and unique visitors, deduplicated per visitor and per link.
- Which link earns its place? A per-link table ranks your cards by clicks, so you learn whether your shop or your Telegram channel is really what your audience wants.
- When are they tapping? A 14-day trend shows whether a video release actually moved anything.
- Where did they come from? Referrer data separates Instagram, TikTok, Telegram and direct visits. This is part of Starter and above.
- Which country? A country-level breakdown is included with Business and Enterprise. Countries, not cities — that is the level of detail the data supports.
One number deserves an explanation, because it confuses people who compare tools. Your page shows two counters: page clicks (taps recorded on your creator page, which is where the referrer is known) and shortener clicks (every redirect of those same links, including people who saved a link and came back directly). They are deliberately not added together — adding them would count your most engaged visitors twice, and the totals would grow for no reason. If a link is on your page and somebody shares it in a WhatsApp group, the shortener counter catches it; the page counter only sees what happened on your page.
What Ethiopian creators actually put on the page
Order matters more than design. The first card is the one most people tap, so put the thing you want to grow first — not the thing you are proudest of. Some layouts that work well here:
| Creator type | Card order that works |
|---|---|
| Online seller (clothes, cosmetics, electronics) | 1) Telegram channel for orders 2) price list or catalogue 3) phone or contact 4) Instagram for new arrivals |
| Musician or DJ | 1) Latest release 2) YouTube channel 3) Telegram for event dates 4) booking contact |
| Food creator | 1) Telegram channel with the menu 2) TikTok videos 3) location 4) contact |
| Teacher or tutor | 1) Registration form 2) Telegram study group 3) YouTube lessons 4) contact |
| Shop or small business | 1) Website 2) Telegram support 3) location 4) contact button with a real email |
A few habits that consistently help:
- Write titles as benefits, not destinations. “Order on Telegram” beats “Telegram channel”.
- Keep titles short and descriptive. Two or three words scan better on a phone than a full sentence, and they stay readable when a name wraps to a second line.
- Keep the list short. Five focused cards outperform twelve; a long list makes the last card invisible.
- Reorder for campaigns. During a sale, move the sale link to the top and put it back afterwards. Reordering takes seconds in the editor.
- Add Amharic where it helps. A bilingual bio reaches both audiences without a second page.
- Use the same page link everywhere. Story stickers, video descriptions, printed QR codes on your packaging — all pointing at one page you can edit later.
- Hide a card instead of deleting it when a campaign pauses: hiding keeps the link and its history, and you can bring it back next month.
Good to know before you start
What it costs. The shortener and the creator page share one subscription. Free (0 ETB) includes the page with up to 5 creator links and the default theme; Starter (199 ETB/month) allows 10 creator links and two themes; Business (499 ETB/month) removes the creator-link limit and unlocks all four themes, social icons, the contact button and advanced analytics; Enterprise (1499 ETB/month) adds teams, webhooks and API keys on top. Creator links do not consume your shortener allowance — they are counted separately, so a Free account keeps its 50 short links and its 5 creator links.
Search engines. Published pages can be indexed, and you can switch that off: a page kept out of search results stays reachable by anyone with the link but does not appear in Google. Published pages appear in the public sitemap only when indexing is allowed.
What is not included. No custom domain on your own hostname — your page lives at short.et/yourname. No city-level geographic data: the country breakdown is as precise as the data gets. And nothing to install: the editor is part of your dashboard and works in any browser, which is the point on a phone.
Your data. Visitor IP addresses are hashed rather than stored, so analytics can count a visitor without identifying them, and click details are kept for 90 days. The Privacy Policy spells out exactly what is kept, why, and for how long.
Start with one link
If you already have an EthioLink account, open the Creator Page tab and claim your name — you will see your page exactly as your visitors will, before anyone else does. If you do not have an account yet, create one free: the creator page is included, and the first five creator links cost nothing.
Then change the single link in your bio once, and let the page show everything behind it.