Bitly Link Shortener Scam

[William Brower]

Bitly is nothing but hackers and phishing attempts.

You will get a virus if you click on any Bitly or Bit.Ly link.

 

I have seen several links posted using Bitly.

An example of one that was used in another discussion is:

http://bit.ly/CsHeXp

 

Many people will lead you to believe that BITLY is a scam,

that you are going to get viruses. There are founded reasons

that they say this, but I believe it to be untrue. It is a fact

that people can use any cloaking or link shortening utility to

hide viruses or other malicious sites for you to click.

Bitly is not the culprit here. Many people who say that bitly

is a scam are also promoting their own link-shortening tool.

This means that they might not have an entirely unbiased opinion.

 

I personally LOVE Bitly.

I think that Bit.ly gets a bad wrap.

The reason that people associate bitly with viruses, is that it

was one of the first good free link shorteners. It is easy to use,

and this made it easy for people to use it for the wrong things.

 

But, marketers love Bitly. Sure, there are some other shorteners

that you can use, but they cost money. I have not found a free

shortener with as many features.

 

How does a shortener work? You have a long URL, or affiliate link like:

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g60927-d2553828-Reviews-SegCity_Guided_Segway_Tours-Corpus_Christi_Texas.html

 

Unfortunately, this is too long and cumbersome for someone to type in,

and if links are too long, they won't send properly over a text message

or twitter message. The solution is Bitly. You can shorten this link to:

www.bit.ly/SegReview

 

Now that link looks beautiful. It is short, easy to type in, and it is customized.

Wait..... you can customize links in Bitly? Surely that costs!

 

No sir/maam. Link customization in Bitly is just another one of the great

free tools at your service. After you create your link, click the pencil icon

located to the right of your link, and that allows you to enter a custom one.

 

There are some things that you must remember when customizing your link.

You want to make it easy to remember and easy to type. This simple philosophy

is part of the fundamentals of marketing. Every step that you take, you need to

attempt to make the maximum impression on somebody, even with your links.

 

Second, remember that capitalization counts. If you want to enter a link called

"moneycow" but it is taken, perhaps Moneycow or MoneyCow is not taken. You do

risk sending traffic to the original moneycow, but many people will simply be

clicking your links. Captialization is also something that you can create

redundancy with. You must remember that people are idiots (slight exaggeration). I'm not saying that to be mean, however you need to plan for them to make mistakes.

 

Using the example of www.bit.ly/SegReview, I must point out to people that the

S and the R are captialized. If I was proactive, and I took every possible

combination of that word segreview (all lower), SEGREVIEW (all caps), then I

am minimizing the chance of losing a customer due to them typing in the url

incorrectly. Essentially, I would create 3 different links, with 3 customized

URLs in order to have redundancy for mistakes.

 

If your website or link is commonly misspelled, you should grab the misspelling

also! This is a process of marketing to peoples mistakes. It is similar to having

the website www.yaho.com. Knowing people's tendancies and planning for them,

is just another small part of internet marketing.

 

I hope that this little guide has helped you understand what Bitly is.

I hope that I've shed some light on the issue, and solidified my stance that

it is not a scam. More rather, it is a very valuable tool that marketers can

use ... For Free!

 

Thanks,

 

William Brower

361-673-3129

CorpusMarketing@yahoo.com

[Maria McCarthy]

Wow, William. Great information! I didn't know you could customize Bit.ly links. I have a few links saved there but don't use them much. I love the added mispelling/SEO advice you gave as well... I think that is more valuable than people will know... hope they use that advice.

[Jim Hipschmidt]

They have hit a couple of the programs that I was using with bit.ly. The killed our links for the 10k challenge. It took us about a week to get them to turn us back on. That was not just my link but EVERYBODY's link.

 

They are hard to get on the telephone and when they did, they really didn't have a good response. If I were you, I would use the affiliate toolbox, http://affiliate-toolbox.net/?rid=3708

 

What do other's think?

[Maria McCarthy]

I use trck me. http://trck.me/191877

[William Brower]

Jim, what do you mean by "they hit a couple of programs with bitly"?

Are you saying that bitly turned off the link shortening for specific

programs? This is the first that I have heard of this.

[Jim Hipschmidt]

William, bit.ly turned off all of the links for the 10K challenge. They have done it to other programs, check links that are broken and you can see others....

 

When I tried to get them on the telephone they were anything but helpful. We got it turned back on but it was several days later.

 

I would just be careful as they were not very helpful once I called...

[William Brower]

Thanks Jim,

 

This should serve as a reminder for people using any

tracking software at all. Don't trust your business

and future to any of them, without checking your links

yourself.

 

Personally, the only time I have ran into this, was on

a site other than bitly. This was a site that is run by

one of the largest groups of Traffic "gurus" in the field.

They have the largest surf group, and the most following.

Their site went offline (with no notice to me), and all of

their links started producing blank pages.

 

I am not using this story to defend bitly, but to let people

know that they need to be weary of everything. This is their

business, and they are the ones who are going to lose out if

a site malfunctions or "turns off" some of their links.

 

 

[Guest]

Even if I used bit.ly for a while without issues, unfortunately it does not provide full tracking reports so I do not use it anymore. In any case, at least this service do not stop the visitor to its own page before yours. Other services do that and the visitor must "proceed" to watch you page clicking on their logo (or somewhere else on the page). Of course visitors go away. Tracking is better, there are very reliable tools out there. It's true they have a cost, but the return of using them is priceless.

[DigitalDon]

The problem with using services like bit.ly TinyURL and others is that you surrender control of the traffic flowing to your site(s). If you have what I like to call "persistent" advertising - advertising that remains visible for long periods of time (e.g. banners) - then you're sunk if the link-shortener service discontinues its service (I've experienced this several times over the years). When that happens, all of your "persistent" ads become totally worthless, since the shortened links they contain no longer work - just as William warns above!

 

I finally ended up installing a link-shortener script on my own server. All the links it generates use the base URL of my website in them, so not only do they direct people to wherever I want them to go, but they also provide a degree of "brand recognition" since some people will be curious and type in just the base URL (without all of the stuff to the right of the ".com.") I often do that myself when I want to learn more about websites someone is trying to refer ME to. I may not learn anything about THAT website, but I usually find out what redirect service they're using at the very least.

 

Because the tracking script resides on MY server, I have total control over it. I'm able to customize the links as I see fit, and I'm able to track all sorts of information, conduct split-testing, and if I wish to change the redirect of a link from one URL to another it's just a couple of clicks (and a little typing too, of course). Tracking scripts aren't really all that expensive, especially when you understand the degree of control you have by using them. While there are instances where it may be better for you to "outsource" aspects of your business, until you hit a certain level of profitability it's probably best to try to retain as much control as you can over things.