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Using Bitly With Squidoo

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Track your links in Squidoo with bitly

If you're placing affiliate links on your Squidoo pages and want a way to both cloak and track them, bitly is your solution. Bitly.com shortens your links, cloaks them and also tracks clicks on them. Its a free service and one that I use for all my affiliate links on my Squidoo lenses. Find out how and why you should incorporate bitly links into your Squidoo pages. You'll never put straight links onto your Squidoo pages again.

A Public Timeline of Links

A Good Way To See How Successful your peers campaigns are!

Bitly makes a timeline of your links available publicly online. If you'd like to view my personal bitly timeline, you can check it right here. You can also check ANYONE'S bitly link performance by simply entering the link in your web brower's address bar, followed by a + sign. For example, I have a bitly link http://bit.ly/squidoo-hlwnpartyfood-horrifying-horsdouevres. If you'd like to check the performance of that link, you would just copy the link and paste it in your web address bar, add a + at the end and press enter. Give it a try right here by viewing a direct link to http://bit.ly/squidoo-hlwnpartyfood-horrifying-horsdouevres+

By viewing your peers bitly performance for links you can see what is working for them and what is not. This is a further tool to measure your own personal success against!

Keeping track of your bitly links

How to manage your bitly link library

In order to track your links for analytics, you must sign up with bitly first and create a free account. Don't forget to log in before every URL-shortening session or else your URLs won't be associated with your account and you won't be able to access them as easily.

Bitly links never go away. You can't delete them, only 'archive' them so they don't actively show up on your reports. How is the best way to know which link is which though? First, you should be sure to make use of the 'customize' feature of bitly links. Give it a short yet descriptive name, and remember that bitly links are never deleted and must be unique. Thus, once you name a link, that name is forever taken and cannot be changed.

Bitly Analytics and Quick Access to Bitly Functionality

Viewing link analytics and using the bitly sidebar tool with Olivier Vasquez

Olivier Vasquez quickly shows you how to quickly check the analytics of any Bitly link by adding a + to the end of it. He also shows you how easy it is to add a bitly button to your toolbar that will allow you to create a bitly link to any page online with a single click.
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A quick demonstration of implementing bitly links in a Squidoo Lens

Tracking affiliate links within my Caribbean Flowers lens.

I've written a lens on Caribbean Flowers which is often my best-performing lens on Squidoo. I'd like to make the most of all the traffic, so I'm sticking a few affiliate links on it. Since I also have other websites where I publish affiliate links from the same companies, I'd like to have an idea of where my sales are coming from and where I need to make improvements. On my self-published websites, I use a database to track clicks on my links and gather analytics on these clicks. I can't make use of a database on Squidoo though. A perfect solution is to use bitly to track these links! In order to know which links are successful and which aren't, I'm going to use a system for customizing my links as well. I'll show you step-by-step how I'm going to do this for this lens. Then, you can have a look at how these links are performing for me through the bitly interface!


  1. Edit the Squidoo lens containing the links to be tracked. In this case, the lens is Caribbean Flowers.

  2. Shorten the affiliate link using bitly. - Just shorten the url portion of your link and not the tracking pixel (accompanying and invisible img file that tracks clicks and records resulting sales so you can receive commission). For example, I'll paste the link http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=Yz833xAR5Cg&offerid=225676.10000021&subid=0&type=4&afsrc=1 into bitly and get the link http://bit.ly/t9dSCY.

  3. Customize your bitly link. http://bit.ly/t9dSCY doesn't really mean much to me. However, http://bit.ly/carib-flowers-naturopathica does. It tells me the Squidoo page I've put the link on and the advertiser. I could get even more detailed if I wanted, stating a campaign, product or even banner ad size dimensions..

  4. Use the shortened, customized bitly link on your Squidoo page instead of the full url. Encase the URL within an anchor tag and keep the image file as well as tracking pixel the same. Thus, <span style="float:left;margin:10px;"><a href="http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=Yz833xAR5Cg&offerid=225676.10000021&subid=0&type=4&afsrc=1"><img alt="Organic Skin Care" border="0" src="http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=Yz833xAR5Cg&bids=225676.10000021&subid=0&type=4&gridnum=14" /></a></span> becomes <span style="float:left;margin:10px;"><a href="http://bit.ly/carib-flowers-naturopathica"><img alt="Organic Skin Care" border="0" src="http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=Yz833xAR5Cg&bids=225676.10000021&subid=0&type=4&gridnum=14" /></a></span>

  5. Measure the effectiveness of your link Just copy the bitly link and paste it into your web address bar, followed by a plus sign and you'll get all the info about who clicked it, how many times its been clicked, when its been clicked, what country the clicks are coming from, etc.. You can check this particular link's effectiveness at http://bit.ly/carib-flowers-naturopathica+

Do You Use Limk Shortening To Track Your Links?

Or do you just use it to fit your msg under 140 characters for twitter?

Do you use link shortening like that provided by bitly to track the effectiveness of your links on Squidoo?

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Link Shortening

URL Shortening and related issues.

Wikipedia has an overview of the concept of URL shortening. It brings up the history and reasons for doing this technique, as well as some of the related concerns (link rot, rick rolling, spam, etc..).

YouTube

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Your favorite link shortener

Do you use bitly.com or another product?

Bitly.com is not the only link shortener out there. Which is your favorite?

How do you keep track of your links in your Squidoo pages?

Do you use bitly, another link-shortening service or nothing at all even?

Do you prefer a link-shortening service other than bitly? Have you never considered the importance of tracking and / or cloaking the links on your Squidoo pages? Do you even put affiliate ads on your Squidoo pages?

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LauraSchofield

Laura Schofield is a web developer, computer programmer, freelance journalist and mother to four children. She writes on a wide variety of subjects, from... more »

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