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It is much easier to remember bbc.co.uk/ rather than brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_motivational5.html?vm=l Accumulate Statistics For Internet or Affiliate Marketers URL Shorteners provide a mechanism to track when, where and how many times a URL is clicked upon. Knowing these statistics is essential to the success of anyone working on-line as you have to know your target market and when they are likely to be online and what types of product they are likely to purchase. I will come back to tracking and statistics in a future post. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) A good URL shortening service will pass along information to the target page by using something called a 301 redirect. I won't go into the technical details in this post but this will help your page to rank with sites such as Google. Free Service Many of the URL services are free of charge. For most uses e.g. Social Media, a free service is absolutely fine. I will discuss in a future post the advantages and disadvantages of free vs paid for URL Shorteners. What are the Disadvantages of Using a URL Shortener? Like most things in life there is normally a balance between advantages and disadvantages. The same is true of URL Shorteners. Spamming The fact that you cannot see the details of the link is used by spammers as a way of getting people to open links that they might otherwise ignore. URL Shorteners Get Closed Some URL Shorteners get closed down precisely because they don't control the level of spam that emanates from their service.

If this happens and you have been using the service then all of your links become useless. Using a Third Party Provider The URL Shortener is effectively another third party in the process between you creating a URL and sending it to your audience. You should therefore choose your provider carefully. Some Sites Do not allow Shortened URL's Due to the level of spam associated with some URL Shorteners, some sites will not accept shortened URL's. This is important for Affiliate Marketers as some providers will not allow shortended links that refer to affiliate products, as they class this as spam! Redirection Could Result in Performance Issues To resolve a shortened URL requires an extra translation between the shortened URL and the target URL. Whilst this should be negligible it will also depend on the provider you use to shorten your URL's. Are URL Shorteners Good or Bad? In my opinion URL Shorteners have a valid role to play, particularly where the life expectancy or a URL is not long... which is particularly true of Social Media. Some of the disadvantages around spam and phishing can be true of any URL, not just shortened ones... the same is true with all links, be careful what you click on! My rule of thumb is that I use a URL Shortener for Social Media and for short term affiliate campaigns. If I write articles or e-books that I expect to live for a longer period of time then I will use the domain name... and mask this if it is too long. Top URL Shorteners The following is a list of the most popular URL Shortening Providers. In subsequent articles I will add specific reviews for these services and also add more providers... my aim with this article is to bring the available information together in one place and make it as comprehensive as possible. • Google • Stumble Upon • Bitly • TinyURL • BudURL • Is.Gd • Tiny • Cligs • SnipURL • Owly What is URL Shortening? The idea behind URL shortening or link shortening is very simple, take a long URL and encrypt it to produce a shorter URL. This is what URL shortening services do. They provide a shortened URL link hider which is then mapped to the original long URL. For example, an original destination link 220 characters long would typically be reduced to 25 characters, this is the link you would pass to your friends. When you friends click the short URL the shortening service website maps this short URL to the original and redirects the user. Social Media Sites With social media sites such as Twitter the sharing of links is problematic at best because of the 140 character limit imposed on message length. This problem has given rise to the proliferation of URL Shortening Services and whilst these services do a fantastic job on the whole there are risks involved with trusting a third party to redirect your links.

Are you using a link shortener yet for your website links and affiliate links? If not, you should be! And it's easy to do. You can choose to use a web-based link shortener like Tiny URL, Bit.ly or Short URL. Or, you can install the Go Codes plugin for Word Press or a free script like Shorty on your own domain and stay in control of your affiliate links. Using your own domain as the base for your short links lets you build links to your site, build your brand, and be in control of where the links are pointing to. There are three important reasons I suggest bloggers and online business owners shorten their links. 1. They make it easier to share on social networks. Especially on Twitter, where you only have 140 characters to share your thoughts, every character counts! A long URL can take up half of your space if you aren't careful. By shortening the link you give yourself more room to "talk" and also make it easier for others to retweet your tweet and share it with their followers.

It is, no doubt, very practical for you to install this type of software if only to ensure that your PC is kept safe from most online threats there are. The program even offers many other protective features such as changing your IP according to your preferred country. Basically, being able to hide your real IP address allows you to escape identity thieves who are ever on the lookout for credit card and other personal information traveling through the web every now and then. It is not surprising to hear about people waking up one day with soaring credit card bills and realizing they didn't even make those purchases at all. While there are many IP changers available in the market today, they're definitely not created equal. Thus, you need to make a careful choice so you get maximum protection from the software. A good one allows you to connect url shortener to the Internet without trouble. Some brands do change your IP but take forever for you to connect online. So choose one that won't have you worrying about whether or not you could even get a connection. Change your IP address and change the way you feel about the Internet. Sooner or later, you'll be convinced that it can be a safe place after all just as long as you have your IP hider.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks also have limits on how many characters long each of your status updates can be. Don't waste your space with long URLs. 2. They allow you to protect your affiliate links and update as needed. If you promote affiliate products, you want to protect your affiliate links so that you get credit for the sales you refer to a product or service. With a regular affiliate link, you might have something like www.somedomain.com/?yourcodehere that's easy for someone to just go direct to the domain. Worse yet, unscrupulous marketers may grab your tweet or status update from a social network and share it - but with their code in place of yours! Using a shortened link prevents someone from easily eliminating your affiliate code. Of course, they can still switch out the link completely, but why make it easy for them? Another circumstance that shortened links you can control are good for is if you're promoting affiliate products and your recommendation changes. If you have a link of www.yourdomain.com/bestwebhost and today you're promoting SuperHost123, you can use your shortened link to point there.

If SuperHost123 goes out of business or you find a better option at BestHost789 you can easily change your link to point to your new recommendation--and the same short link still works. 3. You can track your links to see what's getting clicked. Using some link shorteners gives you an easy way to track how many clicks your links are getting. With Hoot Suite's link shortner, if you choose ow.ly to shorten with, you can easily access statistics on how many times your link was clicked and when. Using the Go Codes plugin for Word Press also allows you to see how many times your links have been clicked. What is a URL Shortener? A URL Shortener is simply a technique on the Internet for taking a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and making it substantially shorter in length whilst still directing to the required Internet page. This is achieved by using an HTTP Redirect on a domain name that is short, which links to the Internet page that has a long URL.

What are the Advantages of Using a URL Shortener? Social Media With the advent of Social Media sites like Twitter and Identi.ca that only allow a relatively small number of characters in a message, using long URL's meant that there was little or no space for the actual message. Shortening the URL allows longer messages to be included alongside the URL. Disguise Shortening the URL allows the originating web address to be disguised. This has some disadvantages which I will cover later but, from a positive perspective, it does allow an address to be made 'more presentable' i.e. by removing all those seemingly random characters and also to hide free link shortener the originating domain name that, for whatever reason, people may not choose to click on. Readability Long URL's are sometime difficult to read and if you need to write one down then the chances or recording the URL incorrectly are high. Memorable In the same vein as readability the shortened URL is far more memorable. In many cases it is possible to format the URL with a description of your own choosing. Making URL's memorable has obvious advantages from a marketing perspective.

There are over 100 URL shortening services online, the majority of which are free. A more complete list of these services can be found on my website. Security Risk 1 - Link Manipulation What is the link destination? There is usually no way of knowing your final destination until you click the link. The true target is obscured. Admittedly this risk applies to all link cloaking technologies but usually when you receive a dubious link via email for example, you can either view the plain text version of the link or hover your mouse over the URL to see the destination address and assess its validity. With all shortened URLs this first line of defense has been removed, you don't know where clicking the link will take you. Email Phishing scams are using the URL shortening services for this very reason. Security Risk 2 - Ineffective Spam Filters Because the original URL is not available spam filter systems cannot make a judgment about the validity of the URL. Plus, with the shortening services being freely available and taking only seconds to use, keeping abreast of this problem is almost impossible. Many shortening services take spam complaints very seriously and disable spam URLs immediately. Some services actively scan registered URLs for blacklisted websites and disable the shortened URLs, but, no sooner is one removed than another takes its place. Even the Safe Browsing features of web browsers such as Firefox and Google Chrome which warns users of malware or phishing sites are no match for shortened URLs. No warning will be issued, instead, users are sent directly to the potentially dangerous web page. Security Risk 3 - Compromised Shortening Service A considerable number of the URL shortening services I've visited have not been very secure. Several let me drop down to their directory structure just by typing an invalid URL. Poor security leaves sites open to risk, hacking such a website would allow popular shortened URLs to be redirected to phishing or malware sites. Security Risk 4 - Privacy Issues Link shortening services are in a position to track user's behavior across many domains so creating possible privacy issues. Security Solutions - Transparency Some URL shortening services are actively trying to solve security issues by adding a "see before you click" functionality to their short URLs. Any tiny URL shortened URL can be prefixed with the text "preview" to show the destination address.

A Bud URL shortened link can be previewed by adding a "?" to the end of the URL. Some services provide a popup window to display the destination webpage when your mouse is hovered over the short URL. Conclusion Unless you are sure about the links you are clicking and you know the link comes from a reliable source (this applies to all links really) then be very wary about the destination page you are about to reach. We've all become very flippant with unknown links, especially if they come from our friends, be careful out their. Primarily aimed at Small Business users, the King Solutions website concentrates on existing Small Businesses and Small Business start-ups, technologies relating to the Internet, ecommerce, affiliate marketing and Word Press development as a CMS platform. If you've always wished for more freedom on the Internet without having to expose yourself to risks, then you need software that makes you do just this. There's a program specifically designed to allow you to surf anonymously without leaving a trail for hackers to trace you through. An IP hider is certainly what you're looking for when you want to preserve your privacy when you're online. For added security, you can even configure your software so that it actually keeps changing your IP address even by the minute. Yes, this is possible and, yes, it is finally possible to surf with this amount of security. If you explore your software and allow it to work, you will realize that it offers many advantages.

Just its auto-IP change feature will allow you to preserve your privacy when joining chats and forums, for example. But the major positive effect of changing your IP address, especially when you configure the software to change it frequently, is safety from hackers. Because your IP serves as the only link between your computer and every other computer on the Internet that you connect to, hiding it will practically solve the threat of hacking. That's because with the fake IP or IPs your software provides, your real IP will be hidden. And as long as it's hidden, you're hidden from every hacker, too. Aside from security, there may be many reasons link shortener why one would want to change his IP address while surfing. Online gamers from banned countries, for example, could easily get into an online gaming site with their fake IP's. When sharing files on an FTP server or downloading from torrent sites, one is able to hide his IP address so even if there was a hacker nearby, no hacking can happen because the hacker wouldn't know what that user's real IP address is. An IP changer can actually provide protection even for basic online activities such as ending emails or simply surfing.