Thursday, March 18, 2010

URL Shorteners for Newbies

Today - I'm going to talk about URL Shorteners - for Newbies - Mainly because I just read a 2 part Blog Post at Lunametrics Blog, which prompted me to write this post - as there are so many different tools available the naive newbies - they have a hard time choosing what is best for their needs
I personally use 2 URL Shorteners as well as StumbleUpon (Tweeting directly from StumbleUpon uses their own URL shorterner, which does not get the Page Rankings we need if we were to use other tools).
The first one I ever heard about was TinyUrl - I was told this was a great one to use by a former coach - being new at the time and knowing absolutely nothing about the internet at all - I struggled with that - I'd also heard about budurl which seemed easy enough to use so I used that for a while. Then I was lucky enough to be shown  bit.ly URL shorteners and how to use them - - I was saved - - this to me was the best thing on the planet as far as URL shorteners and I was concerned. Remember I was so new to this, I used to struggle doing searches on Google for anything. I laugh when I look back only a year ago - I knew zip about the internet.
To learn more about TinyUrl you can visit - Wikipedia for full definition and the pros and cons of using this particular URL Shortener
I will briefly describe for you budurl - Quoted taken direct from BudUrl.com -
"BudURL was designed from the start to give small businesses and marketers insight into previously invisible click traffic. Not everyone has access to Google Analytics and most of those that have it don't know how to use it. BudURL makes link tracking amazingly simple. Shorten the link, put it somewhere, and watch the clicks roll in. It's that easy!
BudURL is easy to use! Just paste in a large, unruly web address in the box above and click the "Shrink It!" button. You'll get a unique BudURL™ that you can use anywhere you'd like such as social networks, instant messages, emails, ad campaigns, electronic newsletters, etc."
What I like about BudURL and Bit.ly is that they can track how many clicks each shortened URL gets. Both of these URL Shorteners also give you the option to customise your URL which I only recently found out - heck it was under my nose after all!
Example I have this long URL
http://www.petsplus.com.au/i_pet-shop-shipping.asp I wish to shorten this for my Tweets lets say (also great for Affiliate URLs BTW) - petssplusship
http://budurl.com/petsplusship ---This is much nicer and clearer don't you think? You may need to click on images to enlarge. As an example I went over and clicked the shortened URL to show you how the stats work.




Bit.ly is much the same not as colourful - however a lot more user friendly - In my opinion that is.  Here I will use another example of one of my existing URLs which I shortened so as I could tweet for a friend of mine in Twitter - here is the long URL -
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcj6x7_rob-smith-fort-collins-co-social-me_tech
Now here is the custom URL I chose - RobAdvert - Note you may need to do a little experimenting as the first choice is not always available. I was chasing a custom name of 'VideoMarketing'- not available.
http://bit.ly/RobAdvert 
I then posted this "Target your customers with social-media-video-marketing....http://bit.ly/RobAdvert" to Twitter - directly from bit.ly with the share button - Easy Peasy!
Ok now let's have a quick look at the stats using bit.ly URL Shorteners.


As you can see by this you get stats with both. You can keep track of traffic to your websites or pages - You're able to customise your links - I have since customised several of my Website's URLs such as
http://taketheplungecoffee.com/Fairtrade-Organic to this http://bit.ly/FairTradeOrganic.
If you have any questions on this subject feel free to comment below - I will get back to you.





Combined with a great Twitter Tool such as Tweetomatic Profiteer - You're sure going to have fun with making money as an affiliate with one of the URL Shorteners and ClickBank








Urzay G is my name - I am COO of Take The Plunge Coffee.com - Since being online - meeting new people - I found myself learning more and more about the internet, online business - and free targeted traffic to our website at http://taketheplungecoffee.com - where I supply first class coffee to Australian residences and businesses delivered via Australia Post.

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