A calm pass at moving your old store.fan/a/ links to join.store.fan
The old links still work, so there is no emergency. A single unhurried sweep through your bio, videos and posts to bring everything onto the shorter format.
Start with the reassuring bit, because it changes how much of your Saturday this deserves. Your old store.fan/a/ links still work. Nothing you published last year has quietly broken, no referral is falling through a crack, and there is no deadline attached to any of this. What follows is housekeeping, not a rescue, and it is best done in one unhurried sitting with a cup of something rather than in a panic.
Why bother at all
Honestly, for many creators the answer is that it barely matters. If your link only ever appears as a tappable link in a bio, the visible difference between the two formats is a handful of characters that nobody reads. Skipping this entirely is a defensible choice.
It starts to matter in the places where a link stops being tappable. A URL read aloud at the end of a video. A line printed in a slide deck. A link squeezed into a bio with a character limit that is already fighting you. In all of those, join.store.fan/yourcode is easier to say, easier to type from memory and easier to fit. The shorter format is also simply more legible as an offer: it reads as a place to join rather than as a code fragment.
The other reason is the one you will not notice for months. Doing this sweep forces you to look at every place you have published a referral link, and most people discover two things in the process: a placement they forgot existed, and three obvious places they never put the link at all. The tidying is the excuse. The audit is the value.
The two formats, plainly
No drama here, and no reason to feel behind if your links are still in the old format.
| The old store.fan/a/ link | The join.store.fan link |
|---|---|
| Still works, still yours, nothing to fix urgently | Shorter, and reads as an invitation rather than a path |
| Fine wherever a link is tappable | Better wherever a link is spoken or typed by hand |
| Awkward to read aloud, because of the slash and the letter | Easy to say in one breath at the end of a video |
| Takes more of a tight character limit | Leaves room for the sentence that actually does the persuading |
| Needs no action from you today | Worth switching to whenever you are editing that page anyway |
| Perfectly acceptable in anything you cannot edit | The one to use in everything you publish from now on |
The sweep, in one sitting
Set aside forty minutes. Do it in this order, because it puts the highest-traffic locations first and means you can stop at any point without leaving the job half useful.
- 1Copy your join.store.fan/yourcode link from the dashboard and paste it somewhere you can reach easily for the next half hour.
- 2Search your own name and your old link format in a browser to find published copies you have forgotten. This takes two minutes and is the step that finds the surprises.
- 3Update every bio you control, one platform at a time. These carry the most traffic and take the least effort.
- 4Update your storefront link card, if you have one. If you do not have one, this is the moment to add it, since the free plan allows unlimited link cards.
- 5Update your newsletter footer and your email signature. Old newsletter issues in the archive are not worth editing, so leave them.
- 6Update the descriptions of your five or six most-watched videos. Ignore the long tail; the traffic is not there and the tedium is considerable.
- 7Update any course lesson notes or PDFs where the link appears, because those meet every new student and are worth doing properly.
- 8Rewrite the sentence around each link as you go, so it names one concrete reason rather than a general recommendation.
- 9Write down anywhere you found the link that you cannot edit, then close the list and forget it.
A worked example: forty minutes, six edits, one discovery
Someone doing this sweep opens with the browser search and finds their link in nine places. Three are bios, one is a storefront card, one is a newsletter footer, two are video descriptions, one is a lesson PDF, and the last is a comment on someone else's video from eighteen months ago that they cannot edit and immediately dismiss. Eight edits, none of them difficult.
The useful part arrives halfway through. Rewriting the sentence in the newsletter footer, they realise it says something vague about a great platform, and replace it with the specific thing that made them switch, which was 0% platform fee on every plan and payments landing directly in their own Stripe account. That single rewrite is worth more than all eight format changes combined, because the format was never what made anyone hesitate. If you want the exact wording to borrow, the plain descriptions on features and pricing are a better source than adjectives.
If you do not have a code yet, you need an account first, and creating one is free.
Create your accountThe mistake most people make
They turn a forty-minute sweep into a three-hour archaeology project, editing posts from 2024 that nobody will read again, and finish the afternoon irritated with a task that was supposed to be tidying. Then they never do it again, and the next format improvement gets ignored entirely because the last one cost them a Saturday. Cap it. One sitting, the places that carry real traffic, and a written note of the ones you cannot fix. Housekeeping should end while you still feel fond of it. If anything about the programme itself is unclear while you work, the FAQ is quicker than guessing.
They work today and there is no action required from you. Move them across as you edit those pages for other reasons, which is the least effortful path to being fully migrated.
Both carry your code, which is the part that matters. The join format is shorter and easier to say aloud, and that is the practical difference to base your decision on.
Appending ?ref= with your code works on store.fan marketing pages, which is handy when you want to send someone to a specific page rather than to the join screen. Keep the short join link for everything else.
No, and this is the one piece of housekeeping that is genuinely safe to postpone. Do it in a quiet week, since nothing is broken while you wait.
Put it in the diary for a quiet weekday, keep it to one sitting, and treat the rewritten sentences as the real output. The shorter link is a small improvement you may as well have; the audit that comes with it is the part you will still be benefiting from next year.
Get your own storefront running first, and the referral code comes with the account.
Start for freeTurn your knowledge into income
Launch your Store.Fan in minutes — sell digital products, courses, and calls straight from your bio. Free to start.
