Are you thinking about running your own URL shortener? If you own a blog or a website, you should consider. There are many valid reasons why you should own your own url shortener.
#1 Branding
Having your own url shortener promotes your website and your blog. Your visitors will see your unique link. When you tweet or share a link with someone, the link you share is yours. It’s unique. It carries your own brand. The short url from bit.ly, tinyurl.com, is.gd, tr.im, cli.gs or from any other 3rd party service works great, but it’s not yours. My personal url shortener is uly.me. Every article on my blog has a short url. Check out the short url at the end of this article. You will see a Tweet This button below.
#2 Independence
There are over 100 url shortener services on the internet. Most of these 3rd party url shortener services are free. There is, however, no guarantee that they will keep their services up and running for eternity. You, however, have control of your own website and your own links. You can control how url shortener behaves. You’ll have the option to determine which hashing methods to use, from base36 to base64, from sequential to random. You call your own shots.
#3 Statistics
Another reason for having your own url shortener is you want to keep track of your statistics. Not every url shortener service has statistics. Every time you’ve send an email with a link, you want to know if your recipient has clicked on your link. If you sent a tweet, you would like to know how many people have clicked on your links. Statistics informs you of the effectiveness of your tweets.
#4 Security
Some people don’t trust short urls since they are essentially cloaked links. There is no telling where a cloaked link will take you. Cloaked links can lead someone to an untrusted or a phishing site. You could easily acquire a virus, malware, adware or spam when you land on an untrusted site. If you run your own website or blog and you use your own short urls, you establish trust with your own readers. On top of that, you are promoting your own brand.
How do I make one?
Ok. convinced. How do I get started? How do I make one? The good news is you can get it here. My url shortener script is available for $99. It’s loaded with features. See below:
Try the Demo > http://uly.me
Features
- Requires PHP, MySQL, .htaccess
- Works with any domain
- 1 configuration file.
- 1 second install
- Base36 encoding
- Can be modified to use Base64
- Sequential links from 10000 to zzzzz
- Hashing can be set to random.
- Supports up to 2 billion links
- Statistics: display number of clicks
- Statistics: display last 10 links
- Search for partial keywords
- API: simple integration with 3rd party software
- API format: create.php?url=http://longurl…..
- URL format of http://short.url/1z35sf
- Seamless integration with WordPress and Twitter
- WordPress: works great with Tweet This plugin
- Creates short url link when publishing a WordPress article
- Price includes installation, support and updates
Try the Demo > http://uly.me
Purchase for $99
