URL Shortening Services Are Holding You Hostage - Fight Back!
Copyright 2010 by Willie Crawford
One of the most useful tools to come along in recent years
for online marketers is url shorteners.
There are sites where you can paste a long, ugly url into
a form, and the site will give you a much shorter url to
use in your emails, newsletters and promotions.
There are also scripts that you can install on your server,
that allow you to generate your own shortened urls, which is
what I prefer, due to the great control it gives you.
In-case you are not using the tiny urls, you’re probably
losing a lot of sales and traffic. The benefits of using
shortened urls typically include:
- They allow you to conserve space when posting to micro-
blogging platforms such as Twitter, where each of your posts
is limited to a mere 140 characters.
- They look more professional than long, unwieldy affiliate
urls (especially if they have your own domain name in them).
Longer urls can wrap to two lines in your emails, forcing
many readers to copy and paste the pieces of the link before
they can visit a recommended page. Many won’t jump though
that hoop!
- They allow you to log into a control panel and change where
a particular link sends traffic without you having to track
down all of the places where you have placed that link and
manually swapping them out. This comes in handy if you are
promoting a particular product, and due to whatever reason,
you decide to promote a different product in the same
category.
There are also times when affiliate programs change the
software that power things, forcing you to change your
affiliate links for a given product. If you use the right
url shortener, you would merely need to log in to your
control panel, click an edit button, change the
destination link, and all of your links scattered across
cyberspace now STILL point to where you want them to.
This is essential for ebooks, because once an ebook is in
your customers’ hands you can’t update those links in most
cases. Only ebooks that connect to the Internet each time
that they are read (which most of MY customer don’t like)
allow you to change links inside the ebook after it’s
distributed.
There are literally dozens of third-party link shortening
services. I’ve used several of them and they work great
except that they control YOUR links. If they get any
complaints, or simply decide to change their business model,
they could kill off all your links instantly.
Premium, third-party url shortening services also hold you
hostage. They charge you a monthly fee for extras, or for
the ability to have more than a handful of urls on their
platform. Some charge you extra if you generate more than
a few thousand clicks - they penalize you for being
successful.
If you stop paying for these premium services, they often shut
off all of your links INSTANTLY. Once you have all those
links floating around cyberspace (in ebooks, articles, ads,
press releases, ezine editorials, etc.) you don’t want to
just kill them off, so you’re STUCK often paying hefty fees,
month after month.
I recently looked at one service that had the audacity
to charge $97 per month to allow you to “white label” their
third-party service, and use your own domain name with their
service. Using your own domain name within shortened links
is a great idea because it brands you and your domain. If
properly configured, it also passes along “link love” from
the search engines, and helps you to rank higher for your
keywords.
However, paying a monthly fee is unnecessary, and therefore
wasteful. Instead invest that money in another area of
growing your business.
Here’s the better solution that I use…
I’ve installed an inexpensive link shortening script, that
works just like those third-party hosted shorteners, on my
OWN server. I paid less than $40 for this script AND I own
it and can use it forever, on as many of my own domains as
I want to (in-accordance-with the terms of their license).
Think about it. If you’re using one of those services that
cost just $30 per month, you’ll save $360 per year using
the solution that I use. You’ll save $1164 per year compared
to that company charging $97 per month!
Heck I could even offer MY OWN url shortening service to my
customers if I wanted to, using this same under-$40 script.
I don’t because spammers love these services, and would harm
my brand and the reputation of my domain name.
That’s another reason why you don’t want to use a third-
party hosted url shortening service. Many ISP’s get so many
complaints about emails containing urls from some of these
services, that they filter against emails containing some of
their domain names. It does no good to build a list of
50,000 if only 20% of your email gets through because of a
poor decision that you made. You’re missing 80% of potential
sales.
If you are the only one sending out from the domain name that
your url shortening script resides on, and you market ethically,
you should not have this problem of being blocked by spam
filters.
I’ve just shared with you some things that most marketers using
url shortening services never really give much thought. Now
that you understand these things, you can set up links that will
work for you long-term, brand you and your domains, cost you
very little, and provide all of the benefits that led many
marketers to use those third-party hosted solutions in the first
place. The big difference will be that you’ll be in-charge of
your links instead of being a hostage to those third-party url
shortening services.
————-
Willie Crawford is an Internet marketing consultant and super
affiliate who has been marketing goods and services over the
Internet for over 13 years. To closely track his promotional
efforts and to cloak ugly affiliate links he recommends using
a url shortening script hosted on you own domain. Willie’s
favorite script is at: http://YourOwnShortUrl.com
