Free URL Shortener Service

If you’re using any of these services to shorten or hide your affiliate links, you would better check them often. You don’t want to lose any chance of getting people to the designated url because the free url shortener service that you’re using is not working right?

I had the experience of sending people to an affiliate site with a shorten url in my Adwords ads and soon realized that the service was down. Damn it! I still had to pay for each and every click that I got.

And recently, I discovered that there are a few popular url shortener services that are always down. If you are using any of these, you would better update them now.

Offto.net – This was a great service by Jon Leger. You can make short your long affiliate links here and even track the hits that it’s getting. Best of all, if the vendor site you’re promoting has an affiliate page that were trying to attract people to become an affiliate, you can even hide the link from showing on the vendor page. Isn’t that amazing? It’s the only service that I have ever came across with such powerful feature.

But Jon decided to sell this a month ago (End July 2009).

And the new guys seem to be messing up not only the service at Offto.net (the site is always down since the transfer of ownership to the new guy) but the mailing list as well. I don’t normally get emails from Jon unless with some great offers or tutorials but this new guy seem to be promoting everything that he come across without even contemplating on the quality of the stuff. I already unsubscribed myself. And I was about to send Jon a complaint for transferring my email address to the purchaser without my consent. You see, there’s always such a note during subscription that says “We respect your email address and will never rent, sell or share it with anybody” but I couldn’t locate it anywhere. So, nothing can be done. Just move on..

snipurl.com – Well, I’ve never use this service before but it’s a popular one that people have been raving about.

Note: Page rank 6/10 and Alexa ranking at 15,862

However, the service seem to be down for too long to assume that it was some technical glitch. If you’re using it, better update your links with a working one.

There are many url shortener services out there but 2 years ago not many offers tracking. They just shorten your long affiliate url but never provide tracking. But lately, we have a lot of services that provides tracking as well that shows the number of visit your particular shorten url has been clicked.

Listed below are some popular free url shortener services that offer tracking capability as well:

Note that they are not listed in any preference order but just a random listing.

http://budurl.com/
http://bit.ly/
http://tr.im/
http://a.gd/
http://cli.gs/
http://su.pr/

However, there’s no way to guarantee that they will always be up and good all the time. Make your own due diligence to check on the site often just to ensure that the site is still working.

Anyway, I have my own checklist to evaluate their services prior to joining them. But please don’t treat this as 100% accurate. It’s just the way I make the judgment base on common sense (Totally personal and I disclaim any liability of following this).

• Make a WHOIS check to see how long they have been in service. Generally, the longer the better.
• Check the page PR – Again, the higher the better.
• Check the Alexa’s ranking of the site – The smaller the number the better. (The most popular site has Alexa ranking of 1)
• Check the loading speed of the site – of course the faster the site loads, the better. As we are actually borrowing space and bandwidth from the site, we need the one that loads fast.

So, that’s it. Choose the one that you feel reliable and convenient to you. There’s of course no way to ensure that these services will have zero downtime. You cannot even guaranteed zero downtime if you’re hosting a script on your own server too if that’s what you’ve been hearing gurus telling about and then “selling” you their script. As it will depends on your hosting provider uptime and downtime.

Anyway there are great opportunity for you if you were hosting a similar url shotener service instead of for your personal use. Just take Offto.net as an example. Imagine how much you could sell the business for once it has some PR and Alexa ranking. And if you were to make it compulsory for user to subscribe before using your service, your list almost grows on its own. Well, it’s really a viable business if you know how to market it.

Well, Cheers!

Waken

P.S. Url shortening, url forwarding and cloaking is all different things. Learn more from my previous post here > Cloaking Affiliate Links