Before You Share Links Online, Do This

Most of us share a lot of links these days. Whether we are emailing or texting someone a link, sharing on social media or putting a link in a blog post or whitepaper—links are pretty ubiquitous. But many people don’t stop to think about the wasted opportunities of just sending plain, verbatim links. The most obvious issue with a lot of links is their length. When links are really long, they just look bad and often have a bunch of random letters, numbers and symbols in them. But aside from simple aesthetics, naked links are inefficient. From a business standpoint, you could be getting more out of the links you share. For example, you should always know at a minimum whether a link got clicked on. Even better, you could know exactly who clicked on a given link—if you are using tracking in many email campaign systems, for example. Beyond just tracking clickthoughs though, there are other ways to really enhance your links. A few of these include: 1 - Making them shorter — this is the most obvious benefit, which makes links look better and contain fewer characters 2 - Branding your branding by using your domain name or a variation of your domain name 3 - Adding retargeting codes to any link you send — this means being able to later serve ads to people who have clicked on your enhanced links 4 - Adding information that can tell you exactly where your click links came from, using the bizarre sounding Urchin Tracking Module or UTM parameters. By the name, the name Urchin came from a company that was the predecessor to Google Analytics that was used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across various traffic sources and publishing media. 5 - For Ecommerce purposes, share links that properly attribute affiliate sales in multiple countries, such as Amazon affiliate links There are many tools to accomplish this type of link-sharing goodness. Five of my favorites, which I will include in the show notes of this episode on Anchor.fm/brandonuttley include: 1- Google Analytics UTM Builder - a free Chrome extension - https://geni.us/chromeutm 2 - Bitly - https://bitly.com 3 - Geni.us 4 - Rebrandly - https://rebrandly.com 5 - Sniply - https://snip.ly I hope you’ve learned a few things about the inherent power of link sharing and that you will check out some of these tools to make your links look and perform better!