Getting the Most Out of AtlasLinq Pro

Upgrade pages are feature lists. They tell you what you get, not what to do with it, and a feature you never open is worth exactly as much as one you do not have.

This is the other version: what actually changes about the way you use AtlasLinq once you are on Pro, roughly ordered by how much difference it makes in a normal week.

Split your cards by audience, not by job title

On Essential you have a single profile. Pro raises that to 3, and the usual mistake is to create near-identical copies with slightly different job titles under them. That buys you nothing.

The split that earns its keep is by audience. One card for client work, with your booking link and your best piece of work at the top. One for conferences and meetups, weighted towards the social accounts you actually maintain and whatever you are building right now. One for the side project, with its own name and logo, so somebody who meets you through it never sees your day job unless you decide they should.

Pro also unlocks the Custom profile type, which is what to reach for when the thing you are sharing is not a person: a freelance practice, a newsletter, a band, an evening consultancy.

The practical test is whether you would be comfortable handing the same card to a prospective client and to somebody you met in a queue. If the answer is no, you want two.

The card scanner is the feature people forget they own

AtlasLinq will read a paper business card with your camera and turn it into a contact. On Essential that is capped at 40 scans a month, which is plenty for an ordinary week and nowhere near enough for a conference. On Pro there is no cap.

This matters more than it sounds. The reason paper cards end up in a drawer is not that people are disorganised. It is that typing them up is a twenty-minute job that waits for you at the end of an already long day, so it never happens. Scanning one takes a few seconds while you are still standing in front of the person who gave it to you.

The habit worth building: scan the card there and then, and add one line about where you met before you put your phone away. Six months later that line is the entire reason you remember who they are.

Custom QR codes, and the one mistake to avoid

Pro lets you change your QR code's colours and put a logo in the middle. That is genuinely useful on anything printed, where a plain black block looks like it was added at the last minute by somebody who did not care.

The mistake is contrast. QR codes survive being ugly. They do not survive being low contrast. Dark pattern on a light background is the combination that keeps working, and it needs to keep working after your code has been printed on matte card and is being scanned at arm's length under bad venue lighting. Brand it with the logo in the centre and leave the contrast alone.

Test the printed version rather than the version on your screen. A phone camera is far more forgiving of a bright display than of ink.

Pro also removes the monthly limit on NFC tag writes, which only matters if you are writing tags for a stand or a set of printed cards rather than for yourself. Writing your profile to an NFC tag covers how that works.

Treat your links as a ranked list

Essential allows 3 custom links. Pro allows 10, and the temptation is to fill every slot.

Resist it. The link section of a card is read from the top and abandoned quickly. The first two get most of the taps. Everything below them exists for the small number of people who are genuinely digging, and that is a fine reason to keep them, but not a reason to pad.

A order that tends to work: the thing you want them to do, then the thing that proves you can do it, then the account you actually check. A dead link or an abandoned profile costs you more than the empty slot would have.

What the analytics screen is actually for

Essential shows you a summary on the home screen. Pro opens the full insights screen, and the useful thing in it is not the view count.

Views tell you your card was opened, which you usually already knew, because you were standing there when it happened. The number that carries information is how many of those views ended in a saved contact. That ratio is a read on the card itself: whether your headline says something concrete, whether the save button is reachable without scrolling on a small phone, whether your links answer the question a stranger actually has.

If you run more than one profile, compare them against each other. A card with fewer views and more saves is doing better work than one with the opposite shape, and it will normally tell you something you can copy across to the others.

A year of history changes the question you can ask

History retention goes from 90 days to 1 year.

The shorter window answers "how did last quarter go". The longer one answers "which of the events I did last year were worth going back to", which is a different question and a considerably more valuable one. If your work has a season, whether that is a conference circuit, a hiring cycle or a festival calendar, the short window quietly removes your ability to compare this year against last.

Lead capture, without the export step

Pro adds a capture form to your card: a short form a visitor can fill in to send their details back to you, up to 25 a month. They arrive in the app rather than in a file you have to remember to open.

This inverts the usual exchange. Normally you hand over your details and hope. With capture switched on, somebody who wants to hear from you can say so while they are still interested, and you end up with an email address instead of a half-remembered name.

Switch it on for the card you use at events and leave it off the one you send to people who already have your number, where a form reads like a mailing list signup. Capturing and exporting leads goes through what happens to them afterwards.

And the ads go away

Essential shows ads in the history section. Pro does not. There is nothing to learn here. It is simply quieter.

When not to upgrade

If you have one job, one card, you meet a handful of new people a month and you have never once wanted to look at analytics, Essential is doing the job. Unlimited tag writes do nothing for somebody who writes a tag once and then forgets about it.

The upgrade pays for itself when you are either running more than one identity or meeting enough people that the admin around it has turned into a real cost. The honest test: if nothing on this page is something you would start doing next week, wait until it is.