Quick Look at URL Shorteners
Often times in email, internet or video marketing it makes good business sense to take a long form url or web address and shorten it. Reasons could include cloaking an affiliate id (if you get paid a commission to resell someone else’s product), cosmetically cleaning up a big long nasty looking url to make your email look less spammy, trying to send someone a link on a microblogging platform like twitter that has a 140 character limit, or for tracking the number of people that click through on a link you put in an email.
This list goes on and on and at some point you will need to use an internet marketing tool called a URL shortener to accomplish this purpose.
To help you figure this out I am posting a great chart put together by Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineLand. The URL service I like the best on this list is BudURL because it offers a FREE, live tracking feature. I also like and have used tinyurl.
I am considering switching over to bit.ly because I am hearing some rumors that some of the Internet Service Providers and web hosting companies have banned BudURL on certain networks (if you have some info on this please comment on this blog). Apparently some of the internet marketing gurus abused the BUDurl service. Bit.ly is also the preferred url shortner service for social media services like Twitter, etc.
Anyway, the chart below should save you a ton of time and effort as you evaluate which free service to use. Enjoy.
