It’s not often that something comes along that impresses the hell out of me right out of the gate but PrettyLinkPro did just that. If you’ve been using social media for any amount of time, and especially Twitter you’ve gotten accustomed to seeing shortened urls to save space which redirect to the intended web page. Until recently there have been several services which you could use to shorten URL’s like bit.ly, su.pr (the one I most used) and twitpwr to name a few. Now, a well written WordPress Plugin comes along that allows you to have your own domain shortened urls rather than someone elses. So for example, instead of tweeting a url su.pr/whatever I could tweet vsellis.com/whatever (pointing of course to whatever I’m actually linking to).
Your first question might be “What’s the big deal?” Trust me, I’m happy to tell you…
1). Having your own url in the shortened url is good for branding
2) Having your own url in the shortened url is good for SEO (no middle domain to go through, it all points to you).
3) PrettyLink Pro comes with all kinds of stats, tracking, reporting, split testing, … the list goes on (see more features on the PrettyLinkPro website).
4) If the shortening service you used before goes out-of-biz or stops offering the service, your link history disappears (think SEO again here) but as long as you have your own domain, you’re golden.
I could go on but those items by themselves are enough to make it fully worth the $97 (but the price goes up after Sep 1 so I would absolutely buy now) but let’s add to the list of reasons to get PrettyLinkPro anyway:
- Tracking clicks from email newsletters
- Measuring the effectiveness of Pay-Per-Click campaigns
- Tracking Affiliate activity
- Tracking offline advertising campaigns
- Tracking social media campaigns
- Beautifying basic PHP script URLs
If you own your own domain, use social media, send out a newsletter, and place where links are used to drive traffic this is absolutely worth far more than the price they’re charging. On Sep 1 it goes up $50 so save yourself a little scratch and go get PrettyLink Pro now, you won’t regret it.
About Scott Ellis
There are a lot of sites that offer this service. I wonder why one wouldn't buy shorter domain names from the start. Let's assume the short ones go first, in this case, having a service to shorten the name of my site might be useful, especially if I want to drop a link on Twitter.