Today's topic is about shortening links as wonderful and necessary marketing tools for every professional e-marketer, and even every conscious internet user as well.
First I want to introduce you to these great tools, how they work, what their many functions are, how you can work with them, and how you can get the most out of them.
What are URL shorteners and how do they work?
Link shortening sites that we talk about today are simply tools that provide a set of facilities for exchanging, sharing and tracking links on the web.
It primarily provides a program that allows you as a user to enter your long links, and instead get short, short links, look more professional, attractive and easy to save.
The primary and basic characteristic of new short links is that they convert, or redirect the user to, the primary link. For example, below is a short link to a link
http://bit.ly/2YrOBMq
Links shortening sites have full control over their shortened links, and this enables them to obtain analytical information about the number of people who clicked on the links, what are their countries, and what is the source from which they clicked on the link (social media site, email, mobile message ... etc. ).
Therefore, what the professional link shortening sites we are talking about today can offer beyond the idea of shortening links or cutting links, there are a lot of other jobs and possibilities offered by link shortening companies.
Before we start on the list of the best link shortening companies, let us explain in the points the most important capabilities, characteristics and functions that you can get from these companies.
What are the capabilities and functions of the link shortening sites
In this part, we will deal with the most important points of what link shortening tools give you, and how you as a marketer can benefit from that:
1- Put a mask on the real link
Links shortening sites enable you to make a mask for the real link that you want to send the user to, and of course we do not mean to praise the feature of masking the real link for the purpose of deceiving the user (we reject in the winners any twisted ways to deceive the user), but masking here is useful at times, including affiliate marketing.
Although affiliate marketing is a legitimate source of making money from the Internet, sometimes a user feels uncomfortable with the idea of making money with it. Here, using the short link masking the affiliate link is an excellent option to solve this problem.
2- Replace the actual link with a short link
This is the intuitive feature that everyone knows, and it is a really great feature that enables you to share links in an organized and consistent manner on social networking sites, and it gives the link a beautiful and easy-to-save format for the user.
The great thing about some link shortening sites is that they allow their users to use a custom domain for them, in order to create unique shortened links that show the brand name.
It is known that the regular short link is the domain name of the link shortening company, like this:
(http://bit.ly/2YrOBMq) for bitly.
In the case of the short link in the Custom Domain feature, the orange part is of your choice, and this is an example of the short link in Apple's Custom Domain method (https://apple.co/2JielVe).
It is worth noting that this feature is mostly on the paid plans, and is not available for free accounts in most URL shortener sites.
3- The ability to track the link
We are just starting to talk about the more advanced features offered by URL Shortener. Most professional link shortening sites have advanced programs to obtain accurate data about each link that is shortened through it.
Do you want to create a professional publication on the LinkedIn website about the best courses for learning digital marketing?
Do you want to have an accurate statistic about the number of people who clicked on each link you share? Do you want to know which country each pressure came from?
All this and more can be obtained easily through links shortening sites that allow tracking.
Of course, sharing on social media is not the only case where you will need this feature, there are plenty of other advanced cases where you can take advantage of its analytical power.
I will not spare you one of my own ways to take advantage of that, which will be clear from the following example.
Read on with more focus, as this is one of my own secrets of leveraging URL shortener sites:
Earlier, I published an integrated and comprehensive guide on ways to profit from Facebook, in which I talked about profit from Facebook videos, profit from online articles as well, and other methods, and I shortened the links to start implementing each of them, and these were the statistics of some Links several months after the article was published.
Here is some information:
The article has been read about 50,000 times.
The first image is an analysis of a link inside the article about video monetization, which got around 6,000 clicks.
The second image is an analysis of a link inside the article about profit from instant articles, which got about a thousand clicks.
What I was able to conclude from this experience
About 12 percent of those who read the article are mainly interested in monetizing videos.
About 2 percent of those who read the article are interested in making money from instant articles.
Most of those who clicked on the links are from Egypt, Morocco and Algeria.
What I can work on based on these conclusions:
There are a lot of people out there who are interested in monetizing from Facebook videos, and I will keep this in mind when determining the ideas for my next articles.
I will write an article shortly on instant articles, but I will prioritize the article on monetizing Facebook videos.
Egypt, Morocco and Algeria are the Arab countries that are most interested in the topic, and I will keep this in mind when writing.
Now, my friend, have you realized the analytical power of the tracking feature that URL Shortener offers?
Don't forget, you can use it to understand your social media followers as well.
The three previous advantages were the basic features of almost all URL shortening sites, but of course there are other advantages and capabilities available in some sites and not available in others, and this we will talk about as part of our discussion of the list of the best URL shortener sites.
What are the best links shortening sites
1- bitly
Bitly is the most popular and most important site in the world of link shortening tools. It is a reliable tool for shortening and analyzing links for millions of users around the world, and it is a site used by many famous brands such as Amazon and Nike.Bitly, link shortener site offers a free package that everyone can use and has great features, but it shows its power
The truth about the paid plans.
Here are some of the most important features of Bitly:
- 2- TinyURL
TinyURL, a long-standing name in the world of link shortening, is the first link shortening site ever, more than a billion links have been shortened through it since 2002, the date of its creation.
If you want a reliable free link shortening service, without any complication in use, but without the tracking feature, then you should have this wonderful and completely free website.
Here are some of TinyURL's most important features:
The site is old and ancient and this gives it more confidence.It's completely free, so it's an excellent choice for just the idea of link shortening.You can change the link as well as the Bitly website.The site is old-fashioned and doesn't get much more than clipping the link.
3- Rebrandly
One of the great URL shortener sites for those who want advanced capabilities and features. It is a professional site in dealing with shortening links, and it always strives to develop what is presented, and add everything that is new and advanced.
You can create a free account with it to shorten an unlimited number of links, with limited tracking of 5000 clicks on your shortened links, and this number is not enough at all (I have seen for yourself how one short link in the winners got 6 thousand clicks).
Here are some of Rebrandly's most important features:
You can change the destination of the short link to any link other than the one you put it first.For example, you made a shortcut to a link on your site, and you shared this link on social media, and then you changed this link on your site, here you can go to Rebrandly and search for the short link and make a change in order to direct to the new link on your site.
You can classify your links according to specific tags to get organized statistics about them and their performance.
You can do retargeting via the short link
You can add a special code in the short link in order to re-target everyone who visits this link. This can be linked to advertising campaigns on Facebook and Google Adwords.
Special guidance for visitors according to certain variables
Through it, you can, for example, send Egyptian visitors for the Arabic version of your site, and American visitors for the English version. Through it, you can also divide the visitors according to more variables and send each category to a unique link.
Its prices are high for everything this offers.
There are many other advanced features in this great tool, as it is an excellent choice for owners of large brands, and professional marketers.
4- Tinycc
One of the great links shortening sites, this site allows you to shorten links without creating an account, and for free, but its real advantages come with the paid plans.
Here are some of Tinycc's most important features:
The ability to modify the link with the free plan, but the links have a specific validity period.
You can invite your staff to use the service and grant them the ability to manage links.
It has the retargeting potential that we talked about before.
Enables you to shorten the deep links for your application.
5- bit.do
A very good and completely free link shortening site, through which you can shorten the links, and track the clicks on them.
Here are some of the most important features of bit.do:
Its completely free, but has paid plans.
Here you can track the links and click on them.
With it, you can edit shortened links.
Shortened links have no specific expiration date.
6- is.gd
This is the last URL shortener site on our list, it is an open source site that is simple and easy to use, and has an easy interface, through which you can shorten links in just a few seconds.
These are some of the most important features of is.gd:
An open source website, which means that there are a lot of programmers working behind it, and this means ensuring its continuity and lasting development.
Completely free.
Using it, you can get statistics about links: Just put a “-” dash at the end of the shortened link
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