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Link Cloaking: TinyUrl, Budurl or None of the Above
By Todd Alan | November 19, 2008
Move over tinyurl.com, there’s a new sheriff in town and his name is Budurl.com. While tinyurl has become a well know solution to shrinking and hiding our ugly marketing urls, it has always lacked one crucial component and that’s tracking. This is precisely where Budurl aims to take tinyurl head-on and it’s a pretty impressive offering for sure.
Tinyurl was the first big boy on the block doing exactly what its name implies, it shrinks urls. So an ugly url like this
http://www.club-veracity.com/2008/finance/credit-counseling/ 10/what-are-the-important-gains-of-a-credit-card-debt-negotiation-program
can be turned into this
http://tinyurl.com/credit-card-debt-negotiation
The second one is far more friendly and apt to get more clicks because for many people long urls scare the crap out of them.
How about this url that screams Click Me So I Can Sell You Something!
http://www.mb01.com/lnk.asp?o=668&c=7211&a=18851
What the hell is that and why would anyone in their right mind click it?
Services like tinyurl, and budurl, solve this problem by making urls like this look a little more palatable
http://tinyurl.com/thesurveyclub
A friendlier looking url like the one above has been show over and over again to get more clicks.
So it’s clear, short, non-marketing looking urls are the way to go if you want to get clicks. But what can Budurl do for me that tinyurl can’t? It can track your clicks.
I had heard of budurl but it was Jack Humphrey’s post Track Your Social Marketing that pushed me to take a closer look and I’m glad I did. Budrul offers the same features as tinyurl with the addition of the all important link tracking.
If you’re sending out tweets, digg shouts, or squidoo casts, for example, wouldn’t it be nice to know how many clicks you’re getting. This will help you tremendously by steering you from wasted campaign efforts and towards those that are actually pulling traffic. It’s all about testing testing testing, and with budurl this is a snap.
As Jack points out in his post, be sure to keep track of where you place your various urls so you know not just that url was clicked x number of times, but where that urls actually was! This means different locations should have different urls.
So is Budurl the end all in link shrinking, cloaking and tracking?
While budurl and tinyurl are great tools, are simple to use, and in the case of budurl offer some great link tracking, they both have one major drawback … It’s Not Yours!
In fact any online url cloaking service has this problem. If you don’t think it’s a problem then consider what will happen if you have a few hundreds (or thousands) of urls out there all running through budurl and budurl goes down for the day due to technical problems (or business failure problems). Instantly your business grinds to a halt and is at the mercy of a third party service to get things going again.
For some marketers having their links become inactive for a day could mean thousands of dollars. What happens if you’re doing a promo or launch of some sort?
Having a third party service being the conduit for your money flow is in my opinion pretty risky. Sure the benefits are that it’s free, simple to use and ready to be put to work immediately, but when you use them be aware that they do carry risks.
And the risks are not just technical downtime wither. Consider that you have those thousands of links spread around the web, or already sent out in an ebook, and your free link cloaking/shrinking service decides to change their business model and chart $5/1000 links. It’s not much, but the point is it’s out of your control.
So while budurl is a great service, it’s quick and easy and free, just be aware of the dangers all this convenience comes with.
I’d be hypocritical if I told you I never use these services myself, but I’m doing so less and less these days as I move my campaigns over to a solution I own and have full control over. One that runs on my own hosting account.
My links are my assets and to place those assets in someone else’s hands for the sake of convenience doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If you’re building a business it’s important to maintain control over your assets, especially the ones that are critical path like your links are, and you can do that for only a few dollars with any of a number of third part cloaking tools.
One that’s been around a couple years now and has a lot of followers is powerlink generator. Powerlink Generator is feature rich but some people have had issues getting it set up. Fortunately their support will actually log into your account and help you fix any issues you have with setup if you ask them to.
There are other options but I have not had a chance to evaluate them personally.
Lastly, these scripts are not that difficult to write if you have some programming skills. Also there are some free scripts flying around but for the time you might spend looking around, testing the various freebies or writing your own I think you’d be better off dropping $20 and then spending your time on more productive tasks.
Topics: Social Marketing, affiliate marketing, link building |
9 Comments »
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If you read this post when I first published it about 2 hours ago you might have noticed I had a mention of Cloak Companion. The mention was just removed after I found additional links on the web showing very different pricing, some with master resale and some without. It’s not clear to me what the master resale terms are and until I clear it up I won’t be endorsing it.
Actually I bought the product to test it and wasn’t even made aware there was master resale rights available. Then I found a sight listing it much cheaper than what I paid AND it included the master resale rights. Anyway, perhaps the guy pushing the resale rights is just ripping it off. I’m looking into it.
Good one dude. I’m always looking for better cloaking tools. Making sure my links are tracked is a must. I use affiliate defender by Jimmy D Smith, but I’m not sure how much it works with various links? Most of my clicks show up….but I’m worried the cookies may not be getting set properly!
I don’t like to use 3rd party services for the reasons you mentioned.
Good post, I’ll continue to look for a great solution I can host myself.
I Hear you Joe. One of my biggest concerns has always been how well the cookies get set.
It’s always a good idea to check each cloaker with each affiliate product you plan to promote. The way I do this is when I decide to promote a new product I simply create the cloaked link and try it myself BEFORE I drop it on a page somewhere. This way I can ensure the click gets tracked and I know it didn’t come from anyone else.
If I’m testing a new cloaker with an old affiliate product I’ve been promoting for a while I’ll usually just set up a second affiliate account with no stats just to test out the cloaker.
A bit of a pain but it works and I can sleep at night
LOL. Wow, I missed that one didn’t I. When I grabbed my account for budurl I was aso wrapped up in other thoughts that I grabbed the free account and then a few days later when I wrote about it I completely forgot they had paid offerings.
It’s good that they have paid plans since it mitigates one of my concerns that they might spring a user fee on you after you’ve built a link empire. So with budurl you know what you;re getting into up front.
With tinyurl there’s still the issue of what will happen in the future. Will they eventually go the way of paid service too? With budurl offering a paid service it may be the push tiny url needs to do the same.
Great “bit” of advice.
Will start shrinking today.
Thx.
Hey Todd, I know not everyone is a member of WA, but for those that are… what do you think about their version.. mylinker, I believe it’s called?
Hey nate,
As far as the tool itself is concerned it’s fine. My problem with any third party tool is what do you do if you ever decide to leave the site?
I like WA a lot and can’t imagine ever leaving. What I get out of it each month pays for itself 10X. But you never know what could happen in the future.
If I have 500 links spread all over the web (on blog posts, in ebooks, forums, social sites that virally propagate a link) then I’m forced to stay at WA, or whatever other pay site I’m using with the linker tool.
If you don’t want to set up your own linker then at least with something like budurl you know you’re not going to have to pay for more than a linker just to get a linker.
btw, I noticed budurl has released their pay plans and for most people the free version will suffice. But if you’re a power marketer you may end up paying there too, but the cost is very low.