Shortening Web Addresses

Web address are long and who wants to look at a 50-character (or longer) link in a tweet or email? You can now use one of several services to shrink them.

I use Bitly - https://app.bitly.com/

Another good one is https://tinyurl.com/app

There are others, but most authors I know use these two.

Both have a free option. At Bitly, you can pay to tailor your Urls so they have your name or publishing company in the shortened url. In fact, if you create a Url for a book listed at Amazon, the tiny url will start with amzn. Others (for your free Bitly account) will be a mix of letters and numbers, though all with start with bit.ly.

 The basic steps are:

1)      Create an account

2)      Click something that will say “Create” or “Add long Url.”

3)      Enter the long url.

4)      Press something that will say “Create Link” or “Continue.”

5)    Copy the link and enter it in a tweet or save it to a document on your computer.

6)      Edit the link name if that is an option.

I edit all my shortened Urls so the list that Bitly automatically creates for me is easy to use. You could name them so they all start with the name of a site (Nook Least Trodden Ground) or start with the book name (which you would likely abbreviate (Least for Nook, Least for ibooks).

It may seem like a pain to create a separate document to store these when they are stored at the site where you make them. I don't, but what I do have is a list of tweets I will reuse. That way I don't have to retype them. Those tweets store the shortened urls.

Anything to save time. 

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