Your Own Short Link Service

Want to know how you can have your own short link service like bit.ly, tr.IM or tinyurl, built in to your own WordPress posted website? I have spoken before about the importance of links to help build your online business presence.

If you have a WordPress site then read on to find out about the power you have in your hand.

What is a link shortening service?

Many links to your website, your articles might be very long. Not that suitable for advertising, or for use in Twitter or Facebook either. A link shortening service is used to reduce the length of the link, but still when someone clicks on it, it goes to the same place you orginally wanted.

The trouble is the search engines rank the short link and the user who's going to click on the link doesn't really know where it's going to go.

How to improve this situation?

Why not have a short link service that uses your own domain name. Now admittedly this isn't going to work so well if you have a long domain name, but if you have short one, it's a great opportunity for you to keep your website address visible to everyone including the search engines. While some sites like Twitter have the “nofollow” attribute set on links, at least your domain name will appear in the search engine rankings, but also in the eyes of the tweeps = twitter followers. This is a great bonus. I have been using this technique on a number of websites and it's showing great results.

To manage this service you just need to install the pretty link plugin. Configure it, there are plenty of tutorials on this, then use it.

This plugin has a free and paid for version, but for this simple task, the free version is enough.

If you would like assistance in setting this up then contact me!

Why Does My Business Need Social Bookmarking?

Firstly, what is social bookmarking?

To be successful on the internet, people, customers, prospects, have to be able to find you. To find you they often use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to look for the "thing" they are interested in. To be found on the first page of a search engine is vitally important as most people, actually more than 95% of people never look at more than the first 3 pages of results. Some of the popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter. 

How is this relevant to social bookmarking?

Well, in short if you have provided items of value, like an article, a book, a video and put it on the internet then the more references there are to that piece of content the better. The social book marking sites, and there's more than 150 of them, create a link back to your article. The search engines love to see this link, they give you credit for having all these links to your content, and presto you climb up the list of results in the search engines. We want our business to be as high up on this list of results as possible, preferably the first page. This isn't an article about search engines or SEO but it is very relevant.

Lets look at this in a bit more detail.

Social bookmarking is a way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs online.  You might have the best product in the world, but if you can’t generate the traffic you’ve just got a nice website on your hands with no customers.  Even if you have a loyal mailing list you will still need to constantly update this by attracting new online visitors.  

There are many options for making connections on social bookmarking sites.  To find the best you need to take your time and surf around.  Once you have researched the best start to set up some social bookmarking accounts that you can use regularly.  

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular of the social bookmarking sites which is both powerful and easy to use. First you need to create an account and then create a toolbar interface.  All that’s left to do is click on the Thumbs Up icon (which is found on your browser after you install the StumbleUpon tool) in order to recommend a website.  This can be done for any websites you own and you can also ask your friends to give you the Thumbs Up.  In addition to these ratings you can also add comments about your website.  

Can you Digg it?  Sounds like a line from a 70s song, but it is actually a very popular social bookmarking site. Digg works very much like StumbleUpon in that users are allowed to push up the ratings for a particular site so that it reaches the front page.  If you can make it to the front page you will be presenting yourself to thousands of potential visitors and more and more people will start hitting your site to see what you are all about.  

To assist you in publishing your information out onto the web there are a number of services available to you. There are both free and paid services and those listed here are the free services. They require a bit of effort from your business to maintain but the effort pays off over time. You will need to register yourself or your business to each of the social sites you want to be profiled on. This can take a little time at the beginning, though once done you don't have to worry about again.

• Clipmarks markets itself as “scissors for web pages.”  This site lets you submit items that are transmitted to the Internet – including to an iPhone and to Facebook.  It provides a one stop shop and can save a lot of time.
• You can sign up with services like OnlyWire to get similiar capability to Clipmarks. OnlyWire has a free and a paid option. 
• Another option is to use a site called Socialmarker. Using your social site accounts it steps your through the creation process of entries in each of these sites. You would repeat this process for each new piece of information that you want to promote out onto the internet.  
• Alternatively you can use ping.fm to connect to all your social media accounts. 

Some of these services provide a small application for your browser. Just install one or more of these plugins for your browser. These "plugins" allow you to carry out a multitude of functions such as clicking once to submit your item to many sites in one go.  In order for this to work, you will need to join any social bookmarking sites you want to use.  

You will need to ensure that visitors to your site know how they can rate your site.  It is not possible to bribe or reward them for bookmarking your site.  This is the social bookmarking equivalent to stuffing the ballot box.  

You can publish links to bookmarking sites as a gentle and polite reminder to your visitors.  Don’t be coy about submitting any updated information to these networks yourself.  You will just need to ensure that you do it in such a way that it doesn’t appear as spam.  If you tell people what you have got and where they can find it there is a good chance they will pass this information on to others.

In the spirit of this article there's a button just below that says "Share / Save". Go on, click and and social bookmark this article and see how it works.

Ever Publish Something With A Wrong Or Broken Link?

Don’t make this mistake again!

Never put a link into an electronic document that isn’t accurate or correctly formatted. It loses you all the benefits of prospective clients and interested readers from finding the information you intended for them. It will cost you sales.

Build it, Test it, Deploy it! RightLinker from The KIX Group provides you this capability, whether on a PC or a Mac, or any platform supported by Adobe Air.

It’s simple to use:

1. Enter the web address (URL) where you want your readers to end up.
2. Next, put in the text your readers will see in your document / article or post.
3. Click the “Make The Link” and the correctly formatted link is created. The link is displayed along with a test link shown in blue.
4. To put the generated code on the Clipboard, click the “Copy To Clipboard” button.
5. To test the link click on the blue link below the formatted code.
6. To clear the form to start fresh click the “Start Again” button.

It’s done! No more hassles or mistakes.

Oh did I mention it’s yours FREE – register NOW!

PS. Many Internet Marketers and casual users have already started using this simple tool. Why not you too?