Did you click my link?

Have you ever sent an email or instant message and wondered if the link you wanted to be clicked was in fact clicked? We’ve all sent something that had us at the edge of our chair, anxious for a response or some type of acknowledgment, that it was read. Let’s face it, not everyone responds back to your email, right away. Yes, those people suck and certainly have contributed to my bleeding ulcer. But to their benefit, people are busy and we should all understand and appreciate that.

I bet you’re saying right now that nobody is as busy as you, right? That you just don’t have the time to read every email, when the sender sends it. I know that during the work day, I can barely fit in lunch let alone click on a link that you think I might like, find helpful, is porn or is sure signs of the next big affiliate/money making craze.  I personally do most of my responding between 8-10pm. This is the time the kids are in bed, I’m on my recliner and I have the time to read about what you think I should know or might find interesting.

If you’re a Twitter user you should be very familiar with seeing (redirect) links from bit.ly. Back in May of 2008 Twitter parted ways with tinyurl.com and introduced bit.ly to the community. In your “tweets”, twitter will automatically convert your link to a bit.ly (masked/redirect) link once your URI reaches 31 characters. If you have exactly 30 characters in your URI, the tweet will be delivered to your followers/list as you designed it, with your URI in tact. Once you reach character 31, truncation occurs and the URI gets trimmed to 27 visible characters and an ellipse (…)  30 total. For affiliate marketers trying to pass off their links, this is a dream.

Sure, it’s another redirect service that will mask your links. But there is soooo much more to it. For example, you can track if your links where clicked, how many times, if they went viral, etc.

How do I create an account with bit.ly?

Let’s start from their main page (of www.bit.ly), yes you do need to create an account. The service is free and registering requires you to enter your email address, a desired user name and password. You can also use the site without registering first, but then you will lose the ability to track and monitor your links.

Now take the URL you’d like to convert, copy and paste into the main input text field on the page.

It’s really self explanatory and I’ll leave it to you to play some more. What I really wanted to share was a technique on how to track if your link was opened.

Earlier this week I had to send a link out to a few V.I.P. people. I also wanted to re-distribute the link to my facebook  and twitter profiles. Because the landing page I was sending people to was not my page/URL and encoding some variables in the URL (for tracking) was not possible. So I recreated the redirect a total of five times, using bit.ly.

You may have noticed when you pressed the “Shorten” button that you were presented with a new area, that looked like this:

I created a “slug” that is rather easy to decipher “000rs-111209″ was it’s name. To me this told me that Roy Smith </fictitious name> received this link on 11/12/2009. Of course you can encrypt these links how ever you’d like. For this post, I wanted to keep it simple.

Within an hour of sending all the emails I was able to see that all five of my links were clicked on. Within that same hour I received one response/confirmation. It wasn’t until later that night that I had heard from three of the four remaining. I was able to start all of those conversations with “I see you read the article I sent you, what did you think”? It is a little presumptuous, but it gets the job done and even makes for good conversation when asked “how did you know?”

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