Breif Introduction
On today’s article i want to talk on how to shortening links for your website and majorly bloggers so that you can on your links.
In this era of the internet and online businesses, the process of link shortening has become popular. The links that you share on social media platforms need to be shortened before they are shared. This is because such links are long and contain many symbols which make them difficult to type when they are shared. For example, if a link is https://example.com/qwerty?asdf=456789&asdf=123456&zxcvb=yuiop, it will be difficult for people to type this long link and click on it by mistake because it contains a number of symbols in it. Therefore, the process of link shortening becomes important in such situations.
What is link shortening?
In simple terms it is a process of reducing the length of a link. Simple like that no bigger basics.
or it is a process of reducing the number of characters in a link.
What are The Benefits of Link Shortening?.
- You can make money from anywhere
- You can make money from your mobile phone
- You can make money from your home
- You can make money from your school
Why link shortening is a good business idea?
- Shortening URLs to make them fit better in a web page or to be humanly copyable by hand, if anyone still does that.
- Hiding malicious URL behind an anonymous shortened one. The hidden link may point to a hacker’s website that might get you malware or trick you into giving out sensitive information.
- Traffic tracking to perform analysis on who visits your pages through the URL shortener.
4 reasons to use a URL shortener.
There are a lot of good reasons to use a URL shortener if you’re going to be sharing a link.
1. Long links can look suspicious
If you’re linking to a specific page buried deep on your website, or are using UTM parameters to track your visitors, you might find yourself wrestling with a lengthy URL.
An oversized URL will look clunky pretty much anywhere you use it—in social posts, shared via text, pasted into an email.
But worse than that, long URLs also look super suspicious. With so many letters and backslashes and numbers and question marks, anything could happen when we click that link! Anything!
Keep things looking neat, tidy and, well, friendly with a URL that’s as short as possible.
2. A custom URL shortener lets you brand your links.
If brand awareness is part of your social media strategy, a custom URL shortener is one more tool to help spread the word.
URL shorteners that allow you to customize your short link offer a chance to name drop your brand. Hootsuite’s link shortener, for example, lets you create a vanity short link in just a few clicks.
Especially if you’re using a free web hosting service, or have an ISP that’s less than exciting, a custom URL shortener is a way to keep your brand front and center whenever you’re sharing links.
3. Link shorteners allow you to track performance.
Most link shortening sites will offer tracking metrics. This is information about who clicked your link, where, and when—information that will help you calculate the campaign’s ROI.
To easily track source traffic, create short links using different UTM parameters. Combine this with other analytics tools—like Google Analytics—and you’re setting yourself up for marketing success.
4. Short URLs allow you to get the most out of character limits on social media.
Twitter has a strict character limit of 280, so keeping posts concise is key. Shortened URLs give you that much more room for that poignant observation about politics, or the perfect punctuating emoji for your killer joke about hot dogs.
Even for posts on Facebook or Instagram, where the character limits are in the thousands, it’s still best for readability and engagement to keep things short and sweet. Short URLs help avoid TL;DR syndrome.
Another benefit of shorter links: they’re also useful for IM or email, where longer links may be hard to read, or disrupted all together by line breaks.
The 7 best URL shortener services.
Bitly for the best all-around URL shortener
Rebrandly for creating branded links
TinyURL for free, fast, and anonymous short URLs
BL.INK for small business owners
URL Shortener by Zapier for automatically creating short links
Short.io for sending different visitors different links
Sniply for adding a CTA to the links you share
Here's how to shorten a URL using three of the most common web shorteners.
How to shorten a URL using Bitly.
You can create shortened URLs for free using Bitly, or subscribe to Bitly's premium service starting at $29 per month. The advantage of a paid Bitly account is that you can create personalized short URLs that resemble the name of your company. This is great for branding.
Even if you don't need the benefits of a paid account, you can create a free Bitly account that gives you access to a dashboard that tracks all your shortened URLs, and how often they've been clicked. It's convenient for managing short URLs you create.
Bitly's dashboard is available for free and keeps track of all the URLs you create.
Here's how to shorten a URL.
1. Copy the URL you want to shorten.
2. Open Bitly in your web browser.
3. Paste the URL into the "Shorten your link" field and click Shorten.
4. Click Copy to grab the new URL.
How to shorten a URL using TinyURL.
TinyURL is another common URL shortener. Just like Bitly, it has premium plans starting from $9.99 a month that offer greater customization for branded links and a dashboard to track and edit the URLs you've shortened. However, you can still sign up for a free account and it can more than serve your needs.
TinyURL is simple to use if you just want to quickly generate shorter links. And it's this simplicity that makes it a favorite for a lot of people.
Here's how to use TinyURL:
1. Copy the URL you want to shorten.
2. Open TinyURL in your web browser.
3. Paste the URL into the field under "Enter a long URL to make a TinyURL".
4. Click Make TinyURL!
5. TinyURL will then generate a new, shortened link for you, and you can share or copy it by clicking on the Share or Copy button, respectively.
How to shorten a URL using Rebrandly.
1. Copy the URL you want to shorten.
2. Open Rebrandly in your web browser.
3. Paste the URL into the "Make your links shorter" field and click Shorten URL.
4. Rebrandly will generate a shortened link below the field mentioned above, and to copy it click Copy.
How to use BL.INK for small business owners
BL.INK
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BL.INK is a full-featured URL shortener service that can be used to not only turn long URLs into short ones but also to track the traffic coming from your links. Its dashboard shows trending links and general statistics, while an analytics page lets you dive into traffic by device, location, and referrers. You can also drill down into clicks by the time of day. Tags, which you can add to your shortened links, let you view your link traffic in new and custom ways and are perfect for tracking and coordinating campaigns.
BL.INK offers four tiers of paid plans to give small businesses, teams, and enterprises a variety of options based on the number of links you need to generate and track. Free account holders can generate 1,000 active links, track up to 1,000 clicks per link, and create a custom domain to make branded links. If you're a business in need of a full-service URL shortener that the entire team can access, and Bitly's enterprise-grade plan seems like overkill, then BL.INK is one of your best options.
Sniply shortener for adding a CTA to the links you share.
Sniply
If you're sharing links to someone else's content (like interesting articles or good videos) in your newsletter or on your social media accounts, you might want to have the last word. With Sniply, you can.
Sniply's big feature is that, as well as giving you a short URL and click-tracking details, you can also add a call-to-action (CTA) over any link you share. So, when someone follows a link from your Twitter profile to some cool article, at the bottom of the page, you can show a pop-up suggesting they subscribe to your newsletter for more awesome links.
From the Dashboard, click Manage > Call-to-Actions and then New Call to Action to create one. Depending on your plan, you can make text, forms, and even image CTAs. Now, when you add a link, you can select a CTA to be displayed to anyone who clicks it. If you just want to use Sniply's tracking and analytics, you can also make a hidden CTA that won't get shown.
The big caveat with Sniply is that, as a marketing service, it's a bit pricier than simpler URL shorteners. The Free and $25/month Basic plans will give you a taster, but for features like removing Sniply branding, using a custom domain, and even customizing the short link text, you'll need to get the $125/month Business plan.
Over to you
I have explored some of the basics of URL shorteners and how they work, but there’s a lot more to these tools that we haven’t covered here.
You start with those for the start for your development.
You could share your thoughts on my social Media platforms.