9 Ways URL Shorteners Make You Memorable
URL shorteners can make long URLs easy to deal with. But they can be used for so much more: bookmarks, audible ads, and links that change their destination.
It’s holiday season at Green Growing Things plant store! Owner Bernice has decided to self-publish a book on the safe care and feeding of Audrey II carnivorous plants. It’s entitled “Blooms Without Blood” and she expects it to rocket to the top of Amazon’s list of gardening best-sellers.
Being a savvy businesswoman, Bernice has every intention of getting her book linked to everywhere she can. She’d like the link to be an affiliate link, so she can get paid not just for being the author, but also for placing the distribution link.
But there’s only one problem. The affiliate link is a mile long. It’s Blooms Without Blood on Plant Books… Get the picture? It’s like Bernice’s first pet bulldog: big, ugly, and incomprehensible. That bulldog made Bernice’s very first Audrey II very happy.
1. A URL shortener can save affiliate links
When you have a long affiliate link like that, you can barely post it anywhere. The link fills an entire social media post. Try to embed it in an email and some email clients will break it halfway through. But you can make it manageable with a URL shortener.
The first URL shortener I ever encountered was tinyurl. You enter a long, ugly URL like Bernice’s, and TinyUrl gives you back a short, beautiful URL that goes to the same place. For example, tinyurl. You can use the short URL wherever the long URL won’t fit. One click on the short link redirects back to the original long link.
The shortened URL is more than just shorter. It’s nicer and cleaner to look at. It hides affiliate and marketing tags. And if someone copies and pastes the link, they won’t accidentally cut the link off in the middle.
Many services like Twitter, WordPress.com, Google, and Amazon have built-in URL shorteners to make it easy to refer to the links those sites generate.
2. Use a custom tag for ease
But tinyurl.com/yl9v2e8 isn’t very memorable. Fortunately, TinyURL lets you specify the part after the slash. I call that the “tag.” Bernice happily enters her long URL, and then enters BloomsWithoutBlood as the tag. Voila! Now she should be able to go to tinyurl bloomswithoutblood and it will go right to her bookstore affiliate link.
3. Use your own URL for flexibility
There’s only one tiny problem. It seem some nefarious trickster has already created a TinyURL with the name bloomswithoutblood. So tinyurl bloomswithoutblood already goes somewhere that isn’t Bernice’s book. This. Will. Not. Do.
The solution here is simple: use a URL shortener that doesn’t start with tinyurl.com. Some URL shortening services like Visit tiny allow you to connect your own custom domain to the shortening service. Then, instead of starting your short URLs with someone else’s domain, you can use your own short domain. Not only does that let you use any tag you want without fear of collision, but it also lets you choose a short URL that’s compatible with your brand.
For example, my own personal short URL is stever.me. If you go to stever zombievideo you’ll be taken directly to the 5-minute promotional video for my Zombie musical. Bernice could put her shortened URLs at https://GreenGrowingThings.com/bloomswithoutblood.
4. WordPress makes shorteners easy
If your web site is based on WordPress, you don’t need an external service. There are a gazillion URL shortener plugins for WordPress. Just go to Duck Duck Go (the search engine that doesn’t track you) and search for wordpress url shortener plugin. The one I use is Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin.
5. Write your own
Truthfully, creating a URL shortener is super-simple. It’s only a couple dozen lines of code, if that. I wrote one about 15 years ago. If you visit getitdoneguy shorten, you can download a free copy of the code. It’s not pretty; I wrote it in Dreamweaver, which inserted a bunch of its own code that isn’t pretty. But a warning in advance: No, I won’t provide support. No, I won’t answer questions about it.
6. Use tiny URLs for bookmarks
You can use short URLs for more than just shortening affiliate links. You can create short URLs as bookmarks that work from any web browser. Let’s say you’re absolutely fascinated by how complex systems work and how to change them. And my you, I mean me. There’s an amazing article called Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows. But of course the URL is unbelievably long and impossible to remember. But a short URL solves the problem! Just type in stever systems and the PDF pops right up. If you care about policy and the levers policy can use to change the world, check it out. It’s the best article on the topic I’ve ever read.
You can also use short URLs that take you directly to a Google Doc or Google Drive folder. Or a shared Dropbox folder. Or a videoconference room you use often. Or the dashboard for any online groups that you manage. Any long, complicated URL you use on a regular basis can be bookmarked easily using a short URL.
7. Use tiny URLs to be memorable
When you’re listening to a Get-It-Done Guy episode, you’re probably on a treadmill, stairmaster, or in your car. Where you aren’t is sitting in front of a web browser ready to type in links. So any links you want to follow, you have to remember when you get to your web browser.
That’s why Get It DoneGuy is actually a URL shortener! Instead of hoping you remember a long URL, I can create an easy-to-remember short URL that you can remember until you get to your web browser.
Visit GetItDoneGuy shorten to find this episode’s transcript, which has all the URLs I’ve mentioned live in the text. That’s GetItDoneGuy shorten .
8. Use tiny URLs when you’ll change the destination
Bernice is loving this idea! Not only is she using her URL shortener for her affiliate links, but she now has her credit card processor dashboard on a short URL. No matter where she is, an easy-to-remember tiny URL is all it takes for her to get directly to the places on the web she uses most.
But there’s just one thing… She likes having a video conference room to meet with potential vendors, members of her Grateful Goddess club, and even the occasional voice instructor. (She slipped off a ladder, let out a little shriek, and broke a wine glass. Now she’s sure she’s an undiscovered operatic soprano. I’m more conservative in evaluating my strengths. I once had gas after eating too many burritos. It did not convince me that I’m the world’s next biofuel. Though it did give me insight into what life must be like for an accordian.)
She isn’t sure whether she wants to use Zoom or Google Hangouts for her meetings. Hangouts are free, but Google won’t say whether or not they’re encrypted (which means they aren’t). Zoom is secure, but it costs money.
Shortened URLs come to the rescue! She sets up the short URL Green Growing Things Video with a URL shortening service that lets her change where a short URL goes. She starts by having the short link go to Hangouts. Later she can change it to a Zoom link if she decides that she’s nervous about her video being provided by a company that helps totalitarian regimes brainwash their citizens. (Search the web for “Google Dragonfly” if you don’t know know about Google’s little China shenanigans.) Either way, the link remains the same: greengrowingthings.com/video.
9. Use shortened URLs to be pronounceable
Short URLs solve another problem. As you no doubt remember from my episode on how to create a good spoken podcast ad, any link you give over the air needs to be easy to spell. You’re already using shortened URLs to your links memorable. Make sure you also use them to make the spelling obvious.
Bernice can predict that some people will misspell BloomsWithoutBlood. Knowing her cutting edge, Hipster-acceptable sense of style, they will of course expect her to spell Blooms bloomz. So she uses her URL shortener to make sure that the misspelled version, Green Growing Things Bloomz Without Blood, still goes to her book.
Links are the lifeblood of the web. And they’re getting longer and longer, as sites use complicated naming schemes to accommodate more and more information. A URL shortener like Tiny.cc or a WordPress URL redirection plugin gives you everything you need: you can hide long affiliate links behind a much shorter link. You can choose meaningful, easy-to-remember links. You can use these to bookmark long URLs you often visit. You can use these to create easy-to-spell links for radio ads and common misspellings. You can even change where short links take you, so the link remains the same, but can send visitors somewhere new, as circumstances change.
Bernice is using the power of shortened links to promote Blooms Without Blood far and wide. And if the occasional Audrey II owner has a pet that goes missing, it’s just a case study for why the book is a “must” for every aspiring gardener.
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. If you run your own business, in January I’ll help you create your strategy and goals for the year in Building Your Best Business 2019. Learn more at SteverRobbins.
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
