All best affiliate gurus spend a big fortune creating, designing and improving their online marketing system to get an unfair advantage over everyone else. As they say, barriers can boost creativity, so people have learned to be pretty witty with 280 characters, even inventing hashtags to make the whole process easier. Some URL shortening services support the forwarding of mailto URLs, as an alternative to address munging, to avoid unwanted harvest by web crawlers or bots.
Once you are set, you can now view cool stats and detailed charts of your links (e.g. unique and non-unique clicks). Don’t worry so much about the whole base64 thing though. There are other masking or cloaking techniques but most are frowned on by search engines due to potential for abuse and usually make use of javascript, server configuration or scripting languages such as php or perl. Another privacy problem is that many services' shortened URL format is small enough that it is vulnerable to brute-force search.
Abbreviate or shorten: Use common abbreviations to make things shorter or just chop off some letters of your name. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. Many URL-shortener services offer the option to track how many clicks each link gets.
Shortening a long address or URL Some web pages may have a long URL that can present problems when it is pasted into another program, especially an e-mail. At the top of the post creation area where you are working on your draft, you can change the slug.
If you’re not tracking your links, you’re probably leaving tons of money on the table, spending more than you can afford, and struggling to keep up with dozens of online marketing campaigns. In contrast, MailChimp doesn't include taxes with purchase amounts in email campaign reports, and continues tracking indefinitely, on a per-contact basis. Combine methods: Use one or more of the above methods above. You can also share files, images and videos easily with Ow.ly in all sorts of different formats. I know that organizers who hire promoters or “event hosts” really enjoy the custom tracking tool because they can see how many tickets each of their promoters are actually selling and get a sense of the buzz they’re creating. An example Turn this URL: X0DER&pf_rd_s=center-10&pf_rd_r=11EYKTN682A79T370AM3&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=1270985982&pf_rd_i=B002Y27P3M into this TinyURL: Which one would you rather cut and paste into your browser? Not all redirection is treated equally; the redirection instruction sent to a browser can contain in its header the HTTP status 301 (permanent redirect), 302, or 307 (temporary redirect). This sounds like a lot of work if you want to track all your outgoing links. TinyURL tries to disable spam-related links from redirecting.[30] ZoneAlarm, however, has warned its users: "TinyURL may be unsafe. After the address has been highlighted, press Ctrl+C or Cmd+C on the keyboard to copy it.