Link shorteners are increasingly important internet tools for everything from promotional links to social media. They’re handy, everyday use tools for professional marketing and communications for reasons both aesthetic and technical.

In this Tiny guide, we’ll take a look at why you should shorten links, how doing so earns more trust, and how you can get started with link shortening.

Why Make a Link Shorter?

There are a bunch of reasons to make a link shorter, from the aesthetic to the technical, and it’s easy to take advantage of all of these aspects for your professional communications and marketing needs.

• Shorter links fit better on a screen, page, business card or packaging

• Shorter links look cleaner and more professional

• Shorter links are easier to remember and spread through word of mouth

• Shorter links make every character count for SMS, Twitter, and short-form marketing

Short links are more visually attractive, stick in the memory better, and can be easily deployed whether in digital or in print and traditional advertising.

Now that we’ve got the why’s out of the way, let’s take a look at how to make a link shorter and easier to trust.

How to Make a Link Shorter: The Hard Way

First off, let’s take a look at the harder, manual way of going about things. You do have a few options, and these will work, but may be more work than it needs to be.

Option 1: Just create short links when making new webpages

On the surface, this seems like the easiest way to get around to making short, shareable links: just make ‘em short right from the start. 

Simple, right? 

Well, this approach is often much easier said than done.

First off, you’ll need to work closely with your web developer every time you put up a new section of your web page to make sure that your URL slugs stay nice and short. This means creative effort, as well as possible missed opportunities to create keyword-rich and descriptive URLs. 

You might not even have this option available to you if you’re hosting your webpage on certain services.

Option 2: Set up your own redirects with a custom branded domain

If your website team is slightly more proficient, you could get around to creating your short link redirects, or even better, your own custom link shortening tool based around your branded domain. This option might seem enticing, but doing your own short link redirects or developing an in-house tool is another deceptively simple option that can obscure a whole lot of work.

First off, if you’re just setting redirects one by one on each of your long links using your own branded domains, then that’s precious web developer time that you’re going to burn on each and every redirect. 

You could set up a custom tool to create your own redirects for your own short, branded links, but this opens up a whole other can of worms, using up developer time to make an automated tool that’s easy enough for the rest of your organization to use, while also being suitably secure so that no unauthorized parties can mess around and deface your redirects.

For the record, this is exactly the kind of problem you’d want a platform to solve for you: developing your own link shortening tool is a lot of unnecessarily complicated work when a more cost-efficient, stable, and secure solution is already out there waiting to be used.

How to Make a Link Shorter: The Easy Way

How do you make links shorter the easy way? Use a link shortening platform like TinyURL. Best-in-class link shortening services make it easy for you to take your original destination link, write in a quick alias (the back half of a link, such as example.com/alias) and then hit shorten.

Signing up for a link shortening service is the perfect answer to how to make a link shorter and more shareable. A ready-made tool makes it easy for you to create as many short links as you need with the press of a button. 

Link management tools also make it simple for you to edit your shortened links, letting you change where a redirect is pointing at, or otherwise tweak technical aspects of a short link without having to bother a developer or possibly break other aspects of your website.

Beyond ease of deployment, link services also provide a ton of other benefits for organizations. Link management tools give you options like tagging links and sorting them into campaigns and groups so you can easily organize your shortened links.

Finally, TinyURL and other best-in-class link shorteners also provide extras such as traffic analysis tools for your shortened links, giving you important metrics on each link such as peak access times, traffic numbers, geographic regions of your viewers, devices used, and other valuable data. 

These metrics can be invaluable for analyzing the performance of your marketing and promotional efforts and refining existing campaigns or improving your future efforts.

How to Earn Trust with Shorter Links

We’ve looked at how to make your links shorter. How do you make them more trustworthy? TinyURL lets you take things a step further with custom domain options, building on your existing branding to build better, shorter, more memorable and trustworthy branded links.

Subscribers to TinyURL’s premium plans can purchase their own custom domain with our all-in-one branded domain service. A simple search bar can help you find a branded domain that fits your needs, choose from a variety of TLD extensions, and once you’re satisfied, we’ll configure things behind the scenes so you can quickly use them to shorten links from top to bottom.

If you already have your own branded domain, we can work with that too, with a bring your own domain feature that combines TinyURL’s best-in-class link shortening with the power of your proprietary branded domain so that you can easily create your own fully customizable branded links.

Custom aliases are one thing, but fully customizing your own branded link adds a whole new layer of brand recognizability – setting you apart from all the suspicious links floating around the internet without sacrificing brevity and utility.

Conclusion

We hope our tiny guide has been helpful in showing you how to make a link shorter, and why a ready- made custom URL shortener is the perfect solution for people and enterprises that need to quickly and securely create, manage and deploy shortened links for your professional communications and marketing needs.

TinyURL is the oldest name in the link shortening game, pioneering the custom URL shortener in 2002 and blazing ground in providing free and premium link shortening options for everyday users and enterprise customers.

TinyURL’s custom link shortener is user-friendly, reliable, and secure, with easy tools for creating and managing your shortened links, as well as a streamlined analytics dashboard that can drill down to the metrics of individual links, or give you the big picture performance of entire campaigns.

Check out more about our branded domain and link shortening features, as well as our easy-to-use link management and analytics tools.

Once you’re ready, you can create a free TinyURL account to quickly start creating shortened URLs, or you can sign up for TinyURL’s paid plans to really get your branded link game going.