Have you ever asked the following questions:
As marketing experts, I find that we tend to use URL shorteners like BIT.LY on a regular basis to shorten our URLs or make them more user-friendly and memorable for viewers.
For example, instead of promotingURLurl such as “https://kemarharris.com/ultimate-affiliate-websites”, it makes more sense to create a shortened version of the URL like “bit.ly/khAffiliateWebsites” or “bit.ly/AffiliateWebsites“.
This makes the length of your link shorter and easier for your audience to remember. Additionally, BIT.LY also allows you to track the number of clicks you have received.
The problem, however, arises when you have created a shortened URL and have spent some amount of time and money promoting and building awareness for your new shortened link then for whatever reason you need to change the destination url. Oouch!!!
In order to protect its users, BIT.LY DOESN’T allow you to modify the destination of a shortened link once it is already set within their system.
I have had this challenge personally during multiple campaigns and it can be very frustrating when you don’t have the power or ability to keep or maintain the destination URL for one reason or another.
There are URL shorteners that actually allow you to modify the destination of your shortened link by creating an account on their website. The problem with these other URL shorteners is that they are not as well trusted or as common as BIT.LY, therefore persons do not respond to them as well.
After some research, I have found a solution to this problem. This has allowed me to safeguard my marketing team from promoting and building awareness around a particular shortened URL without full control of the destination that it leads to.
We have solved this problem by using an intermediate URL shortener whose links are not detected by bit.ly as shortened links. We solved this problem with the use of smarturl.it.
Here is a perfect example of how this strategy can help you avoid a potential loss of traffic or disaster when using bit.ly:
I am promoting a product called AmaSuite. Here is my affiliate link below:
http://geniuskem.amas.zaxaa.com/s/21078061241264
This affiliate link will not be very friendly to promote to my viewers. Hence, I want to shorten this URL and promote it via instead.
However, what happens if my affiliate link gets changed by the publisher without my control?
This means lost of traffic and income since I would have lost potential commission from all the persons who are still using the old link.
What I have done is to create a free account on smarturl.it and use it to generate the following short URL: hyperurl.co/AmaSuiteDiscount
This platform allows me to log back in and change the destination of the shortened URL at a point in time. However, the goal is still to obtain my target shortened link which is: .
So next I create a free bit.ly account and shorten hyperurl.co/AmaSuiteDiscount to be .
Now at this point, I have obtained my target URL and if I need to change the final destination link for any reason, I can simply log back into smarturl.it and change the destination of the link.
Please leave your comments below to let me know if you found this article helpful and feel free to share a better alternative if you have one.