Url Shorteners – My Top 5 Picks

Using Url Shorteners is a must today – not only for the sake of shortening your long urls but also to track the hits and other statistics of all of your links placed in different places around the web.

Using url shorteners is beneficial for a few reasons:

– Cloaking Affiliate Links – you know these long and weird looking affiliate links? Well, you can easily make them shorter… but that’s not it! You can actually cloak them, so it is not so obvious for the person who is clicking on an affiliate link. Of course you shouldn’t use this to mislead anyone but in general people are more willing to click on something they are familiar with (like bit.ly links) rather than a long url full of numbers and #%/ signs.

– Social Media – with the 140 allowed characters on Twitter in mind, shortening your urls comes in very handy – especially if you can replace a 80+ characters long url with a 20+ characters one!

– Tracking – the key to Success Online is tracking and testing everything so you know what works and what doesn’t. Some of the url shorteners allow you not only to track the number of clicks on your link but also the countries that the visitors are coming from or even the type of a device they are using (desktop or mobile).

So here are my Top 5 Url Shorteners that I use almost every day in my online business:

Bit.ly

This is my definite favorite – easy to use, intuitive and with great tracking options. Bit.ly can also create QR codes and has a browser extension for Chrome. With this combination you can create shortened urls with one click of a mouse. One of the best Url Shorteners out there!

Goo.gl

My number two pick and the url shortener I’m using almost as often as Bit.ly is Goo.gl. Simple yet very effective url shortener – you can’t go wrong with Google. Creating a new shortened link takes a few seconds and what is great is all the tracking options, plus a QR code and a Chrome browser extension. Nothing too flashy but very solid.

TinyURL.com

TinyURL doesn’t have the tracking options but it compensates with a few other cool features. First of all, it has a browser extension which works with any browser! TinyURL also allows you to create custom urls which allows you to personalize the url a bit. There’s also a nice pop-up preview which comes in handy at times.

Su.pr

Su.pr is a url shortener created by StumbleUpon. I haven’t really used it much but it has some pretty good features like tracking of the click-through rates and suggestions of the best time to post based on your history. StumbleUpon is also giving priority to Su.pr links over any other links – you can use this little trick to get more exposure.

Is.gd

This is a pretty basic URL shortener but it has an edge over the competitors: pronounceable shortlinks. Many times you won’t end up with real words in your shortened url but the links will be much more ‘pronounceable’ comparing to any other service. Is.gd also has a QR code creation option – everything with a single click of a mouse.

The bottom line – go ahead and try all of these url shorteners and see which one works best for you. All of them do basically the same – they make your links shorter but it is the tracking options and the extra features that really make a difference.

Hope that helps and I also hope to hear from you soon 🙂

Art