URL shorteners are the new cool kid thing to do when sending out promotional links. (See: tinyurl.com, budurl.com, et al) They are a super awesome way to get easy links to pages that may have super-long permalinks or hard-to-remember URLs. Bad side of this is that the bad guys, the hackers, the virus-spreader-jerks have figured out they can use this to send out evil links disguised as trustworthy shortened links that we have all gotten so used to. End result? Your emails are getting blocked, getting blacklisted and make it hard for you to get your click-throughs!! So what’s a good little entrepreneur to do???
Take the power back!! (Thanks to one of my favorite bands, Rage Against The Machine, for that wise turn of phrase!)
You CAN take the power back from those horrid blacklists and hackers by keeping your shortened URLs on your own server. You have options, one of them is hard (getting your own .me URL and doing redirects) and one of them is ultimately easy (after initial set up). So let’s talk about the easy way, eh?
http://yourls.org/ –> This is a free script that allows you to house your custom shortened URLs on your own server. Bonus? You can track your click-throughs via your analytic software. And there is a WordPress plugin that can be used with it! Even easier! Yay!
So how can you get this service up and running? Well, if you are technologically adept, you can follow the easy directions on the yourls.org site and install the software yourself. It’s really not that bad — and if you installed your own WordPress application, you can do this too. But if all things technological scares you, hire a nerd to do it.
Either way, you are going to save yourself time and headache down the road as the bad guys take further control of our legitimate marketing tools — and they will — so the little investment today will make it well worth your time in the future. And the future, my friends, is just around the corner…