URL Link Shortening:What is it?
As the name suggests, a URL Shortener will make those long, ugly looking links shorter and more sharable. While there are many reasons you may want to share something online, for our purposes we will focus on how you do use this to build your business and make money by promoting products and services you love.
Sharing links in an easy and aesthetic way is very important to your web appearance. No one likes those long and unattractive URL links that take up too much space. They can distract and detract readers from receiving the meaning of your message.
Aside from the visual aspect, it is vitally important to track those links. When you are using link shortening for advertising something for your business, you need to know what is working and what is not working. Some companies provide all the tracking information you need regarding your shortened link; such as clicks, conversions, sales, and where this happened on the globe. Having this data is invaluable for knowing where to spend your time and energy sharing more links in the future.
There are many free sites that offer this, a few of them you may have heard of are: bud.url and bit.ly, and goo.gl. There are others that provide both free and paid plans and cover a variety of services that will be helpful to business owner wanting to share information this way,
So, what can you share? How does this work?
You can share images, affiliate links, links to articles, blog posts, websites, social network pages and profiles. Anytime you don't want of need the URL to stand out you can use a link shrotener. For example. you may not want to use it if you are promoting your home page of your website and you are trying to get visibility of www.yourname.com. However, if you are sharing a blog post that is several pages deep on your site, or an affiliate link to someone else product or service, you may not want to put that out there.
Companies That Offer Free and Paid Solutions:
Both of these companies have free plans with limited features. Paid plans is where you get all the goodies. Both plans are comparable in price.
Pretty Link Pro: This is a plugin for WordPress. If you have a WordPress website, this is a great option. With this plugin you can, re-direct, automate, manage and share your links right from withing your blog. At $37, Pretty Link Pro is a great consideration for all that it can do for your business.
Click Meter: This is web based platform for ink shortening and tracking of conversions. It has easily integrable features to connect to you website, WordPress or other. One feature that I really like about ClickMeter is that you can watch click while they happen, live. You just log in to your dashboard and you can view, who has clicked your link and where in they world they were.
If you find this overwhelming, I have a techie package for install and set up of plugins on WordPress. If you chose this you won't have to pay for the Pretty Link Pro plugin because I will use my developers license to install for you.
Best,
Patty Rose
Disclaimer: I may be an affiliate of products, services and programs I recommend. If you chose to do business with these companies, I may get a small kick back. I do not recommend anything that I don't have first hand knowledge, understanding, and/or experience with.
