You have probably noticed all the short and pretty links on different blogs and Twitter by now. Perhaps you’re unsure of which one you should use, or if it makes any difference.
But it does.
The main reasons people use URL shorteners are to make very long affiliate links shorter and prettier or to track clicks on the links, or both.
So here is a break down of the shorteners I am using and the reasoning behind it.
Clicky.me
This shortener is connected to Clicky Web Analytics and you must have an account with them to use it. You can register for it for free, and you can even use the Web Analytics feature for free for one site. It is a great service and I highly recommend it.
Clicky.me isn’t as busy as others so there is still chance you can get some really pretty links, for example I managed to get clicky.me/WPthesis for my affiliate link to the Thesis theme for WordPress, or clicky.me/wpstart for my affiliate link to Lisa’s WordPress Starter Guide.
This shortener has a tracking feature so you can see how many clicks each link received. Also, you can use it to shorten Clickbank links which is a big advantage over some other shorteners (more on that below).
Su.pr
This shortener is a part of StumbleUpon and you must have an account with them to use it. Registering an account is free.
There are some great features you can use with Su.pr:
- you can just shorten the URL
- you can write a tweet or a Facebook update with the shortened URL and send it out
- you can schedule the tweet or the update for a later time
The absolute winning feature of this shortener — when someone clicks on an URL shortened with Su.pr, at the top of the screen they will have a StumbleUpon toolbar which increases the chance of the page being “Liked” on Stumble and going viral.
This shortener has a tracking feature and you can use it to shorten Clickbank links.
Goo.gl
Goo.gl is Google’s URL shortener and you do not need to sign into your Google account to use it. However, if you want to build your URL history (which you should), then sign in before you shorten your URLs.
This shortener does have a tracking feature but don’t use it to shorten Clickbank links because the URL will be disabled:
Bit.ly
Bit.ly or Bitly.com is probably the most popular and used shortener out there. You can use it without registering or logging in, but if you want to have the history of clicks and links you should create an account.
You can customize your URLs but since it is so popular you will have to be very creative to get a name that hasn’t been taken yet.
This shortener does have a tracking feature but don’t use it to shorten Clickbank links because people who click on the shortened version of the URL will get a big warning (and you probably won’t make a sale):
Other Options to Consider
Ow.ly is a shortener from HootSuite. You can use Hootsuite for free and they have a tracking feature for Ow.ly links.
Tiny.url or Tinyurl.com is a free shortener that you don’t register for. It doesn’t have tracking feature but it will let you customize the short version of URL if the “custom alias” hasn’t been taken by someone else.
Two WordPress plugins that will do this for you are Simple URLs and PrettyLink. Note that Simple URLs stopped working for me with the WordPress 3.3 update so be selective about using plugins as a solution for shortening your links, because there is always a possibility for them to break.
Share-a-sale shortener is the best thing you can use for Shareasale affiliate links. Shareasale is a big network with products for any niche and most of the merchants over there will even have deep linking options (linking to specific product rather than the home or sales page) so you can really put their shortener to great use.
Conclusion
Like it or not, you are probably going to end up using shorteners even if you don’t want to, for example when you tweet using HootSuite or some other management tool. So you might as well pick one shortener and use it all the time to track clicks on your links.
Another benefit is they help you memorize some of your custom affiliate links, like I can do with my Clicky.me examples above.
If you haven’t paid much attention to this before, the start of the new year is the perfect time to give these shorteners a try and start making your links look pretty and track your marketing efforts.
I use all of them…Big thanks for Brankica & Lisa!You are the best!
Is there any way you can remove me from that service?
Just removed ya. 🙂
tanks good article guys When I originally commented I clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- check box and now each time a comment is added I get four emails with the same comment. Is there any way you can remove me from that service? tanks :))
When you get the next email, there is an option to unsubscribe at the bottom.
I didn’t realize that bit.ly wasn’t Clickbank friendly
great article can i ask one question my friend told dont share many links in different facebook pages your trafic and seo down what is reality pleas asnwer my question
Great review u got their…been looking to shorten my CB urls and was hapy to find out which URL shorteners allow for that…thnks alot
I use tTwi.st which is a premium URL shortener made for IM’ers. They are Clickbank friendly, have great tracking and have their own API.
I didn’t realize that bit.ly wasn’t Clickbank friendly. I use pretty links for my blog. su.pr for tweets. Great tracking with both of those.
I also use Goo.gl for short url
Great article! thanks Brankica & Lisa for sharing such high quality tips. I’ve been struggling myself trying to find the best way to cloak and track my affiliate links and finally ended up using my own subdomain to do the redirection and click counting. I actually wrote a short tutorial here:
http://www.extracashteam.com/how-to-cloak-and-track-affiliate-links-on-your-blog/
Good reviews of the shortening services out there. I am working on my first affiliate campaign and was trying to find a good shortener to keep track of where clicks are coming from.
i use Goo.gl for url shorter
urlcut.org also tracks clicks, and doesn’t require any form of registration. No ads either!
I’ve been meaning to stop by to tell you just how much I VALUE all of the information that you provide. It’s just TREMENDOUS, Lisa. Thank you!
I am putting a mini-class together about Twitter headline writing and will be citing this article (Why reinvent the wheel?) and your discoveries as the expert with A-1 advice about the best link shorteners to use and more importantly… why.
You’ll know my students (when they stop by), as I will ask them to identify themselves by saying, “Carlo sent me”.
Thank you again for sharing such thorough and useful information, Lisa. You’re a true mensch whose tips and advice I sincerely appreciate.
Kudos to you!
“A study in May 2012 showed that 61% of URL shorteners had shut down (614 of 1002). The most common cause cited was abuse by spammers.”
Check out Wikipedia and see some reasons why…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening
Also, a lot of these shorteners have been placed on spam lists, check out this…http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-deliverability/link-shorteners.htm
Of course you can use them, but why take a chance? And it doesn’t matter what the use is. A lot of business intranets block these links as well. So even if you are just using a shortened link to drive traffic to a blog, they’ll still be blocked by a lot of companies.
Just my 2 cents:)
after thinking about this for a long time, I’ve come to the conclusion that we think too much about this.
Be excellent in content creation and let nature take care of the rest.
The problem with free shorteners is their limitations when it comes to the variety of redirects like 301, 302, or different things like splash pages or promo redirects.
Then of course they can always become like tr.im and simply close down. And what if you need to change the affiliate link? A lot of free resources don’t allow it.
And a more important note is a lot of companies and even countries block most free link cloakers. I mean, think about it. Do you want your employees shopping? Plus there is no way to brand, free shorteners scream “offer”, etc…
But, on the other hand it is free and quick. And if you are a beginning affiliate marketer, I can see why you’d start with them. But sooner or later you’ll need to step up to something more professional.
Actually, it depends on what are you using them for. No one is recommending to use shorteners for affiliate links per se, it is something people need to decide on their own, but even if you want to use them for affiliate links, why not, one time offers and other things that don’t last forever are perfect example. On the other hand, why would you use a shortener for a link you will use “forever”. There are always good uses to free shorteners and I don’t agree that it is a matter of being mature or new marketer.
I think it is a pretty good one too. My favorite thing about them is the StumbleUpon toolbar, you never know who will hit the “Thumbs up” on it
Very nice post thanks to sharing us…
Great post on the types of shorteners and the reasons to use them.
I’ve been burned by URL shorteners closing their doors so I decided to make my own. I tried a few free options, but then settled on a paid solution.
I haven’t tried shortening any clickbank URLs with my shortener. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
Thanks, clicky.me works great! Too bad that bit.ly stopped working for clickbank 🙁
Hi,
Great job mate! Thanks for sharing other two url shortening services.
Daniel
I often use http://short.nr/ for my url shortening.
When I originally commented I clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- check box and now each time a comment is added I get four emails with the same comment. Is there any way you can remove me from that service? Thanks!
Open the email you receive and there’s a way to unsubscribe at the bottom.
There are unsubscribe instructions in the email
I’ve been using PrettyLink Pro for years. I shorten my links with my OWN domain. I love it.
yeah nice articles mate. usually i use bit.ly to shortening my long url. it’s great. 🙂
Travel Destinations Information
Great information, didn’t know some URL shorteners didn’t play well with ClickBank links. I used a URL shortener service once that shut down on me; had to scramble around updating links so I appreciate the list. Thanks!
Oh I am with you on this one… Just imagine having several hundreds of pages of content where all affiliate links for example are shortened and the services shuts down. This is literally days and days of work.
When my plugin broke I had to go back and fix hundreds of links on hundreds of pages so that taught me to stick to my manual shortening from my own domain, lol
You can even try using ad.fly too!! It can be great to track and they even pay you for using the links.. It is always better to register first as you can see the stats and have a history..
Currently I am using bit.ly but some of the site you given looks nice too.
Just decided to on Pretty Link Pro. There are so many voices out there on what this topic. This plugin seems to do what I need, was easy to install and had the most people who had faith in it
su.pr is super! 😉
i do use bit.ly and tiny. url though the others i have seen quite a bit on twitter ..thanks for
how about urlpeak there is a shortener too,,
Haven’t tried it, good to know there is a lot more shorteners to try out 🙂
Yess.. I will try this tutorial about shorteners url .. 😀
If you have a WordPress site, WordPress provides you with an URL shortener with your own domain name. In WordPress admin, just edit your post and click “Get ShortLink”.
That is great for posts but unfortunately it won’t for for affiliate links and anything you want to shorten that isn’t a post on your blog.
To get traffic and ranking at google riset seo onpage or offpage is important. that i wan to ask, is this seo off page?
What do people think about Power Link Generator? Are there any downsides to using it to shorten and pretty-up affiliate links?
I haven’t used it. I have heard of Ghost Link a friend of my uses that will make your aff link look like it is a link to the site itself (instead of ugly amazon links it will look like amazon.com) but the one you mentioned, I haven’t tried. Yet 🙂
These days link shortening services are increasing very tremendously as the social networking sites are limiting number of characters but yes I love Bit.ly the most its the best link shortener.
I have been using number of discussion groups and forums but first time i found here something different and beneficial. I like your topic and links you have shared but little confused about redirecting links as i never used it before redirection.
Stela
hahahha I love Bitly 😀
I like bit.ly. I started using it once I got into Twitter; however, haven’t used it in awhile.
Don’t forget to register a domain and purchase web hosting from Speedy-Joes
Brankica, you opened my eyes for something I have just been using without thinking too much about it. My own favorite is Socialoomph, but they may be connected to someone else. Great post!
I know a lot of people using SO for Twitter, so I am sure it is one of the good ones too.
thanks for share shorteners url. thats awesome
Tim, yes but if the affiliate program changes your bitly affiliate links wont work anymore. Im interested also in embedding links in ebooks. Again bitly might not be good for that if the program changes in the future.
wish there was an easy WP plugin for this…
me too… I am at the moment using manual redirection. I make each link redirect and they all look nice (like if you were using one of the plugins that add domain/go/product, except I do it myself). that is about the only way I don’t have to worry, especially after one of the plugins I used for this broke and I had to find each link on my site and replace it 🙁
I use bit.ly alot cos You can easily share and track your links with bit.ly.its grate.
Thanks Lisa, you’re better at that coding stuff than I am so what do you think about just creating a different page on my site (or a separate site I register – say, call it “Joe loves”) for every product I recommend. Then each link would look like “Joe loves/product X”
Then if something changes in the future, I’d just have to update the page I have associated with that product. Does that sound logical?
Is there a downside if to using a plugin like Pretty links ect? For example, suppose I use pretty links to cloak a link in an ebook for a product CJ and down the road the product moves its program to shareasale.
Would I be able to update the links in the ebooks that were already sold with a pretty-links plugin or would it be better to create a page for each affiliate program I recommend and update them as needed.
Lisa, how did you handle this for your ebook?
Good point. Definitely a downside to using a 3rd party. You would not be able to update the links in the books already sold. For my book, I used my own, self-hosted redirect links using the meta refresh method. Basically you create a new folder on your server, create an index.html page and paste the meta refresh code into the page.
I am using this road now where my links have the form of domainname.com/recommends/product but they are all redirects from my own server. They will be easy to update and I don’t have to worry about plugins any more.
Bit.ly is so far the most used and the most preferred one. Well, I am a big fan of it too! 🙂
Thank you Lisa. I like to use bit.ly. That URLs shorteners is very easy to learn and easy to apply. Long URLs can be shown in a short URLs. But I haven’t used it for affiliate purpose, because I do not know anything about it .. 🙂
I’ve been using goo.gl and bit.ly. Thanks for sharing other two url shortening services.