How To Shorten A Url

Lori P. Jun 25, 2012 · 3 min read

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

How To Shorten A Url

Running a good marketing campaign has everything to do with tracking what’s working and what not. A good way to do this is to know how to shorten a url within your marketing campaigns so you can see right away if you are getting the results you want.

Why exactly would would you need a url shortener? For example, let’s say you decide to run an ad on Craigslist, and you want the people who read your ad to be sent to your website so you can sell them what you are offering, OR a capture page where you can collect their name and email address for further marketing. You may have an “ugly” url that looks like this: /commissionloophole.php?id=shmerns for which their are 2 purposes of url shortening:

You can use shorten urls to make your url appear smaller.
You can use link shortening to track the number of clicks you get to see if you are running a profitable campaign. (In my opinion, this is the #1 reason).

Here Is How To Shorten A Url – A Few Simple Steps

There are free and paid version of almost every marketing tool you could imagine, and although there are many advantages to using paid versions, you can still get very good results with free versions to start.

So in this case, how to shorten a url using the free version is what I’m about to show you. You have a few really good url shorteners available that offer a free version of their service.

Bit.ly
Tinyurl.com
Goo.gl

For purposes of demonstration here, we’ll use Bit.ly so just head over there and sign up for a free account. Once you are signed up, to shorten your url proceed as in the image below.

From there, you will add the long “ugly” url you want to shorten in this search bar. The thing I like the best this particular url shortener, is that you have the option to customize it. Not only does this help you when you are tracking the clicks, but it also looks much nicer when you are using it in a marketing campaign and it tells the viewer what you’re link will give them. See below:

“How to shorten a Url” is a breeze when you follow these instructions… AND you’ll be able to create a custom link shortener in an instant when you need it. After you’ve entered your long url, just click the customized button as seen in the image above and name it something you will remember and that will be of interest to your viewers. Remember that sometimes the name is taken and you will need to keep entering a name until you’ve found one that isn’t in use. For our example above, I’ve entered fastincomevideo as my shortened url name.

So now I’m left with a url that went from this:

to this:

Doesn’t that look so much nicer?

PLUS, you are now going to be able to track how many people click on that link!

To be able to track the number of clicks that you’re new custom shortened url has, just go into your bit.ly account and at the top of the page you will click on “Stats,” this will show all of the links you’ve shortened with their corresponding clicks. Easy!

So you see, how to shorten a url is super simple when following these easy instructions, now go ahead and create your own.

If you found this article helpful on how to shorten a url, please leave you’re comments below, “Like” it and “Share” it as well, thanks!