URL shorteners have become a way of life with affiliates, bloggers, Twitter users, email marketers and a whole host of other people. A URL shortener takes a long and ugly URL like http ://thisisanextremelylongwebsitename.info/thepageiwantyoutogoto/?myaffiliateid and shortens it to something like bit.ly/ Aw7m.
You get three benefits:
- It looks better and in the case of Twitter doesn’t take up many precious characters of the 140 you are allowed
- It “cloaks” any affiliate id’s or other sensitive website information
- The URL shortening website tracks the stats of each shortened URL so you can see how many people clicked on the link and which site they were on when they clicked.
There are several URL shortening websites and all of them offer the basic service for free. Twitter mainly uses Bit.ly. Tweetdeck, the desktop application used by many Twitter users defaults to Bit.ly but also allows you to select digg, is.gd, tinyurl, tr.im and twurl. Then there is cli.gs, budurl and many more.
As handy as these services are, there can also be huge problems when things go wrong. A couple of months ago, Cli.gs was hacked and virtually every url was redirected to one website. I know, because I was a cli.gs user. OMG! Where are all those links scattered among the various websites and autoresponder emails!? It took several days for cli.gs to fix everything because their backup systems were not working well enough to switch over to a backup database. I spent hours finding and changing all my links.
Today, I see that tr.im is going out of business at the end of the year. If you go to their website, you will see this apologetic message:
“We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t
justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.”
My advice? Other than using a shortener for Twitter, I would use them sparingly in other places and keep a journal of where they are so you can change them if necessary. If you are in need of cloaking, I would instead use an html or php redirect.
I’m interested to know what you think. Do you use URL shorteners in your websites, emails, etc? What would be your advice?
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This post was written by...
Christine Cobb is a web technology consultant, a small business online marketing consultant and provides information for new bloggers and affiliate marketers. Please let me know your thoughts about this blog post. I recommend the products and services mentioned here either because I've personally used them or know the distributor's reputation. Assume links are affiliate links.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
THE URL DOESN’T SOUND TO ME LIKE A USEFUL THING. IT IS TRUE IT IS SHORTER BUT CAUSES MORE PROBLEMS THAN IT HELPS. SOMETIMES CHANGE IS NOT GO.THE HTML HAS BEEN AROUND FOR AWHILE AND THE BUGS HAVE BEEN WORKED OUT OF IT. MAYBE IF THE BUGS WERE WORKED OUT OF THE URL IT WOULD WORK BETTER., BUT NOW I WOULD SAY NO TO URL.
I do use bit.ly for tweets and FaceBook posts. On my blogs, I use a plug in to cloak affiliate links.
I like bit.ly because I can see how many click throughs there were. However, I agree that you shouldn’t use it for links that are important to your business and that you want to last “forever”.
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