Bit.ly tips and tricks

Bit.ly. is a link-shortening web service.  The idea behind a link shortening service like Bit.ly, and there are several other such services online, is that many links are just too long to be useful.  Long links tend to break when sent by email, they are ugly, and long links are not practical for micro-blogs like Twitter.  Therefore, the usefulness of link shortening services.

The process is simple.  When you create a shortened link through Bit.ly, the new link is a Bit.ly directed link which triggers a many-to-one relational database lookup that finds the actual web URL which is the destination or target link, followed by a re-direct to that site.

So, you have a shortened Bit'ly link and a longer destination link, but there can be multiple shortened Bit'ly links created by several different users, all pointing to the exact same target link URL.  Many-to-one.  Bit.ly counts every time someone clicks on one of its shortened links, it aggregates all the various Bit.ly link clicks to a common destination URL, and it reports both counts to any user with a Bit.ly account who created one of the links.

In the Bit.ly screen shot below, the numbers "0 out of 704" indicates that nobody has clicked on the Bit.ly shortened link that I created, but that 704 people have clicked on other Bit.ly shortened links to the same target that were created by others.  That's the tip.

The trick: With this specific example, I had received a Bit.ly shortened link in an email newsletter from an internet marketer.  After I clicked on the Bit.ly link, I copied the actual URL that I was re-directed to, and then used it to create my own Bit.ly shortened link.  I assume that the seven hundred four clicks to the other Bit'ly links is a fair representation of the internet marketer's newsletter click-through numbers five days after his email newsletter was sent.  That's about all the clicks he is going to get from that newsletter, based upon my experience.

If one wished to speculate about email open rates and click-through rates, one might be able to estimate the size of the internet marketer's email list.  But that is way too tricky for me.  However, it is still my opinion that the link shortening services sell their link popularity data to the search engines and the market researchers, see: Social Media Data Extraction.  It might be a good idea for internet marketers and search optimizers to know and use these services responsibly.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
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