URLs can get long, complex, and distracting, but they’re an essential part of promoting your podcast. This is where URL shorteners come in – they make it much easier to direct people to your show’s site, social profiles, and other digital properties.
Thinking about using link shorteners for your podcast? Keep reading to learn more about how they can help you reach a wider audience and engage your listeners better.
What Are URL Shorteners?
URL shorteners are tools that take long or complicated URLs and shorten them into something more understandable and manageable.
For example, a link like “example.com/resources/podcast/s1/ep-29-climate-documentary-review/” could be shortened to a generic link like “tinyurl.com/ep29resources” or even a branded link like “example.com/ep29resources”.
Shortened links are more visually appealing and easier to share. Even better, they can be tracked and customized to improve your promotion strategy.
Link Customization
Most free URL shorteners shorten your URL to a generic link using their own domain name plus a string of unique characters (or “alias”) to identify the page – for example, it can take the link “https://example.com/listen/episodes/season3/ep-119/” and shorten it to “tinyurl.com/8FkzqotDj”.
Some tools like TinyURL allow you to customize the alias of your shortened link, even at free tiers. This means that, instead of a generic alphanumeric code, you can customize the alias to “tinyurl.com/podcastxyzep119”.
With paid subscriptions, you can take it one step further with branded shortened links that use your own name. For example, instead of getting a generic URL, you can generate links like “example.com/ep119”.
Link Tracking
Although they’re called link shorteners, these tools do more than that – they also provide in-depth analytics and tracking capabilities that tell you whether your audiences are actually clicking on them. You can also get insight on:
- How many times a link has been clicked
- What devices your audiences are using to access your links
- When your links get the most engagement
- What sites or platforms drive the most clicks to your short links
- How it performs compared to other shortened URLs that drive traffic to the same URL
How Can Podcasts Benefit From URL Shorteners?
URL shorteners can be essential in engaging and understanding your podcast audience. Below are some of the ways podcasts can benefit from shortened links:
Driving Action to Your Show
Long links clutter your messaging and can even overshadow it. Plus, the typical un-shortened URL is clunky and confusing, which discourages people from even clicking in the first place.
In contrast, branded short links are more user-friendly and transparent. Audiences are much more likely to click on or share “xyzpod.com/ep23” than “podcastxyz.com/listen/episodes/s3/hy2lsj9pqiwja941lmq”.
This promotes sharing, increases your click-through rate (CTR), and drives traffic. At the end of the day, it boils down to clear communication and expectation-setting: with custom shortened URLs, you show your audiences exactly where you’re sending them, more effectively encouraging signups, listens, and other valuable actions.
Driving Action from Your Show
Our favorite solution by far is what link shorteners can do to drive digital actions from your episodes themselves. They’re a perfect fit for the audio medium, because for listeners, “sign up at example.com/community” is much catchier and easier to remember later on than a long and elaborate URL, a default shortened link, or some vague instruction like, “Join our podcast community at our website.”
Branded link shortening solves the ultimate problem for podcasts in the digital age, which is, “How do I get people to take digital actions to grow my podcast, when my URLs are so damn long and hard to remember?”
Wide Shareability
Considering the character limits on many social media sites and the attention span of social media users, every character matters. As you’re not wasting any space on extra-long URLs, you can pack your post with more information or hashtags by using shorter links.
Additionally, some social media and email providers block links to external sites, especially those with generic or spammy-looking URLs. You can prevent your posts and emails from getting blocked by using clear, branded links. The more places you can place your link, the more backlinks you can get – and with your target keywords, too.
Branding Consistency
It’s easy to keep your podcast top of mind when you’re linking to your website. But what if you want to link to other websites and platforms where you have a presence?
URL shorteners enable you to reinforce your branding no matter what you’re linking to – even if it’s to sites you don’t own. You can customize your generic links to include your podcast name and other brand elements, or you can leverage custom, branded links to put your name at the forefront. For example, instead of linking to your Facebook page with a link that starts off with ‘facebook.com‘, you can link to example.com/FB, reinforcing brand recognition and visibility while also making it easier for listeners to take actions later.
Branded short links are much more effective and easy to use than generic links. Note that not all link shorteners, especially free ones, allow you to customize your URLs.
Simple, One-Stop Analytics
The best URL shortener for your podcast will come with tracking tools that enable you to better understand who’s listening to your show and what strategies are most effective in reaching them. You can monitor how your links are doing, identify which ones are driving traffic and which ones are underperforming, and find out from where and how your audience is accessing your content.
For example, you can assign one creative link per episode and learn which of your links drive valuable actions. From there, you can fine-tune your URLs to make them even more engaging.
How To Find The Best URL Shortener For Podcasts
With the huge importance of clean links in online marketing, it’s no surprise that there are many URL shorteners on the market today. But how do you choose the right one for your podcast?
Let’s break down some of the most important factors to consider when choosing the best URL shortener for your show:
- Features: Although all URL shorteners can reduce your long links, some come with additional features like slug customization, domain customization, and link analytics. Make sure the URL shortener you choose provides the features you need.
- Link volumes: Link shorteners typically offer subscription tiers based on how many links you want to shorten per month. Most platforms also offer discounts on annual plans.
- Pricing: The cost of URL shorteners can range from free to hundreds of dollars per month. While you can shorten any one link for free on many platforms, even without signing up, more features and links typically cost more and require an account.
TinyURL: The Best URL Shortener for Your Podcast
If you’re promoting your podcast online, then branded short links are the best links to use. TinyURL reduces and customizes your links so that they’re much easier to share. But it’s more than just a URL shortener – it also tracks the performance of your URLs, so you can manage your campaigns more effectively.
TinyURL offers a free plan with basic monitoring once you register an account, while paid plans start at $12.99/month or $9.99/month on an annual plan for 500 active URLs, branded links, URL tagging, and detailed analytics. Bulk plans start at $99/month for 100K active links.
