Create custom shortened links

When you do a lot online there is usually a need to track which of your efforts are actually being paid attention to and which are not. One way is to track how many people are clicking on the links you post. Bit.ly is a service letting you shorten links, but did you know you can customize those links?

A Bit.ly account

The best route with this process is to create a free Bit.ly account. This will give you more options that we’ll talk about later.

The sign up steps are pretty minimum. You can put in the usual info or use Facebook or Twitter to create an account.

Once you have an account, you should see a dashboard like this.


Near the top right you will see the Puffer fish near the text box. This is where you will paste a long link to shrink it.



When you shrink a link it will look something like this.

 








See the link next to the word copy in the bottom right? This is your shortened link. If you were to copy and paste this link to anywhere, the person clicking on your link will be taken to whatever link you shrunk.

Creating a custom link

To make your own link, you can click the pencil next to the link. The box will pop up and let you type whatever you’d like in the box.

What you will want to do here is add something descriptive. If you are linking to an article you wrote about big orange spiders, you can add that as your custom link. I made a link with the end “nikoo28blog”.

Now you can easily share this link with your friends without the hassle of remembering long names... :-)