April 10, 2008

Resource: Make Your Links Look Better

In your newsletters and email campaigns you don’t want to include super long hyperlinks that have a tendency to break when your reader opens the email. Meaning, they won’t be “clickable”.

Solution: TinyURL.com.

TinyURL.com is a free service that will make any link smaller, and thus, much more manageable to use in your marketing materials.

Why is this important?

In your 1ShoppingCart account (my favorite service for accepting credit cards, sending newsletters, marketing your services online and more) you are able to create links to track your marketing efforts.

Say one of your networking partners is going to mention your website in their newsletter. Rather than just give them your website link, you go into AdTracker in your 1shoppingCart account and create a special link that will be just for their use, so you’ll know exactly if your partnership with them is paying off. Each time someone clicks on that link in their newsletter, this link will track it. And this takes just a few minutes to set up.

Then you can go into your account and track which “Ads” are paying off.

The problem is that AdTracker links are rather long and convoluted.

That’s when you go to TinyURL.com and convert that link into a much smaller link.

Here’s an example.

Here is my AdTracker link for this blog post. Meaning, if you were to click on the following link, which I set up for it to take you to my newsletter sign up page, I’ll know that you came from this very blog post:

http://www.on2url.com/app/adtrack.asp?MerchantID=55928&AdID=377751

Here is that same link using TinyURL:

http://tinyurl.com/4gtyqk

For marketing purposes TinyURL.com makes sense.

To your continued professional expansion,

Karin

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Filed under Blog, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Resources by Karin