November 09, 2018

Easy & Free Custom Social Media Buttons Tutorial

Sometimes when you're trying to get noticed as a new blogger, it can be really hard. And with sites like LinkTree, customizing your social media links for free can be difficult to show your personality and style. So if you're after a total customization and a free way to jazz up your social media links to put in your Social Media bios with all your social links, read on!

Step One:

Make a new project file in your image making program of choice. You all know by now my favourite is Affinity Designer, a one-off payment editor with vast skills alike Photoshop. Start by file > new > and enter your custom dimensions. For this project, mine are 650 x 87. You can further alter their size in your blogger dashboard if they need tweaking afterwards. 

I've made my background a solid black colour and added INSTAGRAM in white text using a free font called Poppins. You can use any font you'd like, making sure it's readable and clear to your blog readers. Once you've made a design that you're happy with, added icons (if you want) or overlay a colour, etc, you can export/save it as a .PNG file. For this tutorial, there's no need to upload your image to an image hosting site. This will all be done in your blogger HTML post. 

Step Two:

Start a new page by going to your Dashboard > Pages > New. Title the page something like Links or Social Media and then making sure you're in Compose mode, click the Insert Image link that looks like a little picture. 

Add your image into your New Page and center your image in the middle of the page. Click your image and then select the "Link" option on the bar. Add the link to your selected social media, e.g. Instagram or Twitter, and click OK.  You can continue to add more social media images the same way using the same style and centering them all in an image block one after each other. 

Step Three:

To make the short link, like the picture below, go to Bitly, a free site for shortening links. Once you've signed up, you can create a shortened link. Because mine is for my Bookstagram account, I've called it simply beccalinks. This will take you to my new Blog Page with all my images that we've made above. Bitly is very accessible and easy to use making short links and viewing stats for it. And because we've customized the buttons ourselves, it's totally changeable and suits your personality.

I hope you found this little tutorial helpful! Do let me know what buttons you create! I'll be launching some graphics soon that you'll love as freebies to help your blogging journey.
happy blogging!