How to use short links in your #ContentMarketing for #ProfessionalServicesFirms

If you read my previous blog post, you’re hopefully starting to implement campaign tracking code to start measuring what’s working for you (content marketing wise) in your professional services firm.

You may have also discovered that you get some massive long URLs when you add all those campaign tracking variable to your links.

As promised… here’s how you fix that.

Fix 1 – The Simple Solution

There are a number of services that offer creation of short links, our preference is bit.ly.

You can choose to use it as a guest, where you’ll just paste your blog links with campaign tracking code already added into the input box at the top of the page.

Bit.ly will generate a custom short link. This is the link you’ll share. Done.

Fix 2 – The Improved Solution

Really not much more work and still using bit.ly, you can create an account. There are a couple advantages to creating account.

The main two are; you get stats to measure engagement for each of the short links and you can use advanced setting to use your own custom domain as the short link (explained later).

Once logged in, similarly to ‘Fix 1’ you just paste your link into an input field and hit enter.

Bit.ly will generate the short link and store it. At this point you can also choose to share it directly to the social platforms you’re connected to (Twitter or Facebook), copy it to use elsewhere, or even edit it first so you have a really ‘pretty’ short link.

If you want to start editing the short links so you have something that doesn’t looking like ASCII vomit, you’re better to set up your own custom domain.

We registered 1rabb.it specifically to connect to bit.ly to allow us to shorten and edit links with more freedom.

The URLs are also then very recognisable to your brand which as a by-product will increase trust when someone sees it. This should go a long way to improve total click throughs.

Here’s the shortened and customised link to my last article after using the steps above http://1rabb.it/track_your_blog.

You now have the tools to;

–          set up the campaign tracking code ‘protocol’ for your professional services firm (download the spreadsheet here)

–          shorten links

–          ‘pretty up’ your links

–          start sharing and tracking content like a marketing pro.

If you missed the first article, read it here.

If you’ve put this into practice in your firm or have any questions about the process, post you comment below or tweet me.