Blog
Marketing: Link Shorteners
Written by Andy Patterson
One of the most useful tools you can use when marketing yourself on the internet, is that of the Link Shortener.
Often a link to a page on your website or webstore or facebook page or whatever will be a long link – and one that is difficult to remember, and that takes up space. So for example – the link to the album page on the Abubilla Music download store:
http://smcc.bandcamp.com/album/graceless
Now what would be useful is if we could create a shorter address that re-directs above. Lucky for us, there are services available:
Tinyurl.com is one of the services that does just that. Its very simple to use – simply go to the site and enter your url and it will shorten it for you. You can even define your own shortened link-although a lot of popular and obvious options have already been taken – however it still manages to shorten the 40 character URL to a 26 character URL. The link is:
http://tinyurl.com/73jyvrq which isn’t particularly memorable, however http://tinyurl.com/tatigraceless is, and this also links through to the album page.
Another Link Shortener is Bit.ly
Bit.ly is useful in that it tracks the number of times the link has been clicked and gives you further insight into where the clicks have come from geographically and in terms of where the re-direction came from, so – from an email, or on a webpage, Facebook or wherever.
Google, as with most things, also have their own service. This is at: http://goo.gl/ and seems to offer much the same as bit.ly.
The Analytics are very useful, as they can tell you what is working, and what isn’t – so if you have 50 clicks through to your album page, you can find out where they are coming from – and this measure of measurability is very useful as to where you need to spend more time and effort on your promotion.
Check the various services out, and let us know via the comments, how you get on. Thanks.