The power of tinyurl.com

Today I want to talk about a very useful service called tinyurl.com.

What this simple service does is transform a super long url into a short one.

For example if I have the url: http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/50-tips-on-getting-more-traffic-to-your-website/

I can I use tinyurl and it will generate a much shorter url for me to use like this:
http://tinyurl.com/5c4jx2

Now if I put http://tinyurl.com/5c4jx2 into my browser it automatically forwards me to http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/50-tips-on-getting-more-traffic-to-your-website/

So how is this useful?

This is useful for long urls when you are sending them in an email.

In emails long urls sometimes will have the end chopped off and you end up with something like:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/50-tips-on-getting-more-traffic -to-your-website/

Because of text wrapping the url is no longer valid.

This wrapping issue also occurs in some forums. When this happens tinyurl is a good solution.

Some forums, like WarriorForum, shorten urls for you.

They do this by truncating the url.

So the url http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/50-tips-on-getting-more-traffic-to-your-website/ would be shrunk down to http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/50...website/

If someone wants to copy the link they end up copying http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/50...website/ and not the actual link.

A while back someone on the WarriorForum posted a list of “90 Resources for WordPress Templates” with a whole bunch of links to various sources for cool WordPress themes.

Unfortunately about half the links had been truncated to have ‘…’ in the middle of the link so people couldn’t copy the list and save it.

I took the list and fixed all the links and put them into an easy to copy list:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/90-resources-for-wordpress-templates/

Trouble with MapQuest

One of my favorite uses of this is when you want to email a mapquest url like this one:
http://www.mapquest.com/maps?1c=San+Jose &1s=CA&1a=%5B3060-3099%5D+King+Est&1z=95 135&1y=US&1l=37.29435&1g=-121.75735&1v=S TREET&2c=San+Jose&2s=CA&2a=%5B5600-5749% 5D+Herma+St&2z=95123&2y=US&2l=37.24925&2 g=-121.82445&2v=STREET

With tinyurl I can shorten this nasty critter to something short, manageable, and easy to email:
http://tinyurl.com/6ekcmw

Hide affiliate links

Tinyurl is also useful for hiding affiliate links when you don’t want people to know that your link is for an affiliate program.

So you could change http://pathway100.com/?e=nick1123 to http://tinyurl.com/56zdwx

Try it for yourself

Count how many times people click on your link

DwarfURL is a similar service to tinyurl but it takes this idea of link forwarding to another level.

With DwarfURL you can track how many times people have clicked on your url and been sent to your site.