If you have a website or a blog, your goal is to gain more visibility and to bring more visitors to your webpage. There are multiple, fruitful social media techniques you can use, but one of the most important is branding. You are probably getting your website’s name out there and started sharing its URL on social networks like Facebook and Twitter by using generic shortened URLs but they don’t look personalized enough, do they? Maybe it’s time to bring your website’s URL to the next level of branding and include its name in a shortened personalized URL. The following tutorial will show you how to do that.
But before I start, let me show you want a shortened URL is. The URL of another article on our site is:
https://wplearninglab.com/659/install-google-analytics-wordpress-beginners/.
You can share that URL, but it looks messing in social media posts where there isn’t much space. So a good strategy is to use a URL shortener like Bit.ly where you can create a URL that looks like:
Click on it, you’ll see that it goes to the same place.
The benefit of using a service like bit.ly is that you can also some basic analytics reports about your link. Below is an report of a link I created an hour ago and shared on social media, it’s already been clicked 36 times!
To take the shortened URL one step further, you can brand it. So instead of bit.ly your shortened URL could be learn.ly if you have an educational site or medali.st if you have a site about the Olympics or tax.es if you’re an accountant. You get the idea.
So, now that you know the what and the why, let’s get into the ‘how’. Below are the steps you’ll need to take to create a personalized short link.
How to Create Your Personalized Short URL
- First step is to buy a short URL. You can use a number of tools for finding domains. However, one of the most used is Domainr. Once you head to Domainr, type in the word that you want to include in your short URL, like your website’s name or your brand’s name and this tool will provide different suggestions of how you can assemble it with a variety of domains. Once you figure out which domains including your preferred name are available, head on to a site like GoDaddy.com or Domain.com and acquire it. For the next step, your URL can’t have more than 15 characters.
- Once you have bought your short domain name, create a Bit.ly account to set your custom short domain. It is free of charge and it will offer the ability to set up your customized short URL and follow the statistics on it. By default, you need to verify your email address in order to create the free Bit.ly account. After you have signed in on Bit.ly, select the tab ‘Settings’ from the upper-right corner of the page, click the ‘Advanced’ tab and choose either ‘Personal’ or ‘Business’, depending on what your needs are. Insert your short domain and head to the next step, which will explain how to create an A Record for your short domain link before you verify it.
- Set an A Record, or a DNS Host for your short URL in order for it to point to the IP address of bit.ly. Go back to the site where you registered and purchased your domain. At GoDaddy.com, the A record’s location is in the Domain Manager, under the DNS tab. Set the A Record to point to the 69.58.188.49 IP address which belongs to bit.ly. Then you have to wait for about 48 hours for the domain changes to take effect. Afterwards, you will be able to set your customized short link as the default domain in your bit.ly settings.
- The last step is to verify the tracking domain, by setting it up in the ‘Advanced’ tab of the bit.ly settings. Insert the domain name, not the short URL recently created, and verify that you are the owner of it. After the setup is done all the shorten URLs created will be branded with the specific domain name.
Although the classic URL is useful, a short personalized URL is considerably easier to remember and in addition to functionality, more elegant in appearance. Using a shortened URL branded with your domain gives a professional touch to your link when you promote it on social media channels.