Pretty Links - Track Everything!
If you've read our foundational "Home Business Strategy Course" you know how adamant we are about tracking everything. We referenced Pretty Links in the course. Whether it's tracking things like your marketing, articles, ads or other things Pretty Links is the tool to use. You can even use it for shortening URL's and creating affiliate links.
More...
Pretty Links in its purest form is an URL shortening application. It allows you to take a long URL and give it a shorter URL. We use it all of the time for this purpose. Here's an example...
In this example we took the long URL (target URL) we use for SEO purposes and dropped it down to a 2-word URL (Pretty Link). Here's the difference...
- https://buildingmyhomebusiness.com/article/millions-are-seriously-hurting-financial
- https://buildingmyhomebusiness.com/millions-hurting
See how much shorter the Pretty Link URL is?
It's also far easier to remember and it's a lot easier to type into a browser, two strong advantages to a shortened URL.
We want the longer URL for SEO purposes, but many times longer URL's are harder on potential clients/followers to use so we shorten the URL for them.
The other foundational use of Pretty Links is to mask affiliate links. Let me show you an example using NameSilo who we use for purchasing our domains (a lot less money than GoDaddy):
- Affiliate URL: https://www.namesilo.com/register.php?rid=0c66326kc
- Masked using Pretty Links: https://buildingmyhomebusiness.com/namesilo
A consumer may not want to click on a URL like the Affiliate URL. But the masked URL is not intimidating and doesn't freak people out.
Along with this we can also track how many people clicked on our different affiliate Pretty Links to see which products they're the most interested in. This helps us to strategize what types of products we want to take on.
Do keep in mind, if you're not familiar with affiliate products the consumer doesn't pay more for a product offered by an affiliate... they pay the same price. The only difference is the affiliate makes a few bucks for referring the consumer to that product.
This is foundation to Pretty Links, but this isn't where the value of Pretty Links ends.
Tracking Hits To A Web Page
We track literally everything we can. We just shared with you how we use Pretty Links to track affiliate products we offer to people.
What you need to understand is the only way we can effectively make good decisions is by knowing the results to our marketing efforts.
Pretty Links also tracks how many people use the link. It shows total uses and uses from a unique IP address right on the main screen.
Let's say we create a display ad like this...
The URL on the image and in the body of the social media post (if posted on social media) will be a Pretty Link. The URL in the ad above is a Pretty Link.
Very quickly we can see how effective an ad is.
We can also use Pretty Links on our articles Feature Images. We always share our articles on numerous social media platforms. By using Pretty Links we can see which articles are the most read which lets us know what topics people are the most interested in.
Track, track, track!
Pretty Links is an important tool for tracking hits to a web page... to articles, to courses, to recommendations. We can put them on the Feature Image, on ads and every place else.
Needless to say, we really like Pretty Links a lot!
Learn more about Pretty Links here: Pretty Links