Should you be using link shorteners to condense your website and affiliate links?
Here are their pros and cons of using link shortner. Plus, you'll learn about a better way to shorten your affiliate links the right way, and have full control over what you do.
How Link Shorteners Work
There are various link shortening services available, like Bitly, Rebrandly, TinyURL, ClickMagick, and more. These services help you turn long, ugly affiliate links into short, neat URLs.
However, there are also significant downsides to using these services, which we will discuss below.
The Pros and Cons of Link Shorteners
Pros:
- Ease of use: Creating shortened links is simple, nice sounding and can be done in seconds.
- Trackability: Many services allow you to track your traffic sources and the number of clicks.
- Mostly free: Many link shorteners offer free plans, with some advanced features available at a cost.
Cons:
- Lack of ownership: You don't own the domain name, so if the link shortening service changes its terms or algorithm, your links may become useless.
- Building up someone else's links: Using link shorteners means you're building up their sites instead of your own.
- Potential costs: Some services charge for advanced features. and some have monthly limits
A Better Way to Shorten Your Links
Owning your own website and using a short domain name is a more effective way to shorten your links. You can use subdomain redirects, PHP redirects, or WordPress redirection plugins to create and manage your shortened links.
This gives you more control over your links and allows you to benefit from any search engine rankings and traffic generated by your links.