Case study: Carbide Outdoors turned a single bio link into a 14% affiliate-revenue channel

Note: Carbide Outdoors is an illustrative composite based on patterns across several real Tracklume customers in the outdoor and gear-review space.

Carbide Outdoors is a two-person outdoor gear brand on Instagram, YouTube and a small blog. Most of their revenue comes from affiliate links to camping and climbing gear. By the time they reached out, social was sending them around 28k visitors a month — and almost none of that traffic was earning anything.

The reason was simple: every social channel pointed to a generic link-in-bio page with eight rotating buttons. The buttons sent visitors to product pages on the blog, where the affiliate links lived. Every redirect dropped visitors, and the gear pages weren't optimised for someone who'd just tapped "shop the kit" on a Reel.

Their owner, Jonah, put it bluntly: "Our bio link is a junk drawer."

Step one: replace the junk drawer with a gear page

The first move wasn't clever. We built a single Tracklume bio page that mirrored Jonah's actual recommendations — about 24 items split into four collections: shelter, sleep system, cook kit, packs. Each item was a product card with an image, a one-line "why I use this", and a tap-to-buy.

Every product card was an affiliate link routed through a branded /go/ short link. That meant we could track each tap, A/B the copy, and replace the destination later without rebuilding the page.

In the first week, with the same traffic, EPV (earnings per visit) on the bio page roughly quadrupled compared to the old Linktree. The mechanism was boring: visitors stopped bouncing on the intermediate page.

Step two: geo routing per product

Jonah's audience is roughly 50% US, 25% EU, 15% UK, 10% rest-of-world. The bio page was sending everyone to the US storefront of each merchant. We added geo rules per product so:

• A UK climber tapping "Aeros Pillow" landed on the UK retailer with the UK affiliate tag.
• A German camper tapping "MSR PocketRocket" landed on the DE retailer.
• A visitor from Brazil saw the US listing — same as before, but disclosed in the card.

Effect: total affiliate revenue from the bio page lifted another ~40% week-on-week. Most of that came from the UK and DE audiences, who had previously converted at almost zero on the US storefronts.

Step three: collections in the link

The blog's biggest organic page was a "what's in my pack" post. We took the same products from that post and put them on the bio page as a "this week's pack" collection at the top.

Then we did the inverse: in every blog post that mentioned a product, we replaced the raw merchant URL with the Tracklume short link. Same tracking, same routing, single source of truth for the destination. When Jonah swapped out his stove three months later, we updated one Tracklume link and every mention across blog, bio page, YouTube descriptions, and email updated at once.

This is the part most creators skip. It costs you an hour of work the first time and saves you a weekend every quarter forever.

Step four: the A/B test that actually mattered

The interesting test wasn't on copy. It was on order.

We split-tested the bio page with two product orderings: "newest gear first" versus "best-converting gear first". The second won decisively — about 22% more revenue per visit — because the audience treats the bio page as a recommendation, not a feed. Putting the highest-trust products first compounds across taps.

A second test on the "why I use this" line under each card moved the needle by another ~9%. The winning pattern: one specific situation, one specific reason. "Used this on a wet five-day in Snowdonia. Stayed dry, packed in under five litres." Not "great waterproof shell".

The numbers

Twelve weeks in, the bio link channel went from less than 1% of Carbide's affiliate revenue to about 14%. Traffic to the bio page was up roughly 30% on the same social reach because the gear page itself was being shared.

• Replacing the junk drawer with a gear page: ~4x EPV from the same social traffic
• Geo routing per product: +40% revenue from the same visits
• Reordering by best-converting: +22%
• Copy specificity: +9%

The compounding bit matters more than any single number. Each layer was cheap, and each one multiplied the layer below.

What I'd do differently

I'd build the gear page in week one and ship it before the geo rules. The first lift was the easiest, and it was the one that bought us trust to do the more invasive work in week two and three.

I'd also stop trying to be clever with copy until the routing was in place. Sharper "why I use this" lines bought us about 9%; geo routing bought us 40%. Routing comes first.

What to copy

If you sell affiliate gear off a social bio link, do these in order:

1. Replace your Linktree with a real, on-brand gear page. One source of truth for every product link, tracked end-to-end.
2. Add geo rules per product for the storefronts where you have meaningful non-home-country audience.
3. Reorder by best-converting, not newest.
4. Rewrite each card's reason as one specific situation and one specific reason. Stop describing the product.

None of this needs an engineer. All of it pays back inside a month.

That's the whole case study.