TinyURL makes me “Click the Link”
Don’t know what about you guys, but ’till I started to twitter I didn’t really need TinyURL eventhough I knew it was outhere, live and kicking. This post is dedicated to Kevin Gilbertson who invented TinyURL, ’cause as far as I see it, he is sort of a genius – not so much for changing long URLs to tiny ones, but for making me curious. TinyURL is a great marketing tool in terms that it makes me “click the link” otherwise (when seeing the URL behind it) I might not.
A Story about a Hot Lady in a Hot Red Dress
Admit it – if I tell you a story about some hot lady in a hot red dress and then invite you to see her picture on this URL: http://tinyurl.com/6be7xa instead of this one: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-14/bearded-lady-in-red-dress.html- you’ll definitely click the first one but you’d have your doubts about the second one, right?
A-Ha! That’s exactly what I’m talking about! TinyURL allows you to create some mystery around your outgoing links and that mystery works like magic in term of CTR.
Tiny vs. Whiney
As far as wiki can tell us about it, this may (and did) cause some problems such as easy spam or getting into sites that might offend you, but I think there are more advantages than disadvatages into TinyURL [Shout your thoughts on the comment section if you think differently 
] and at least the offending issue can be solved by using the preview version of TinyURL…
For those who are new to TinyURL, just before I say good night and make myself feel tiny again, here are …
Some TinyURLs You Might Aappreciate:
http://tinyurl.com/2pb7f8 – this TinyURL is somehow related to FireFox.
http://tinyurl.com/2vmzcv – this TinyURL deals with something I mentioned here earlier.
http://tinyurl.com/24lp7m – this TinyURL is for opera lovers (wink, wink!).
http://tinyurl.com/2hesey – this TinyURL is stat related.
http://elfurl.com/gpchk - this is like TinyURL but its elf based and it refers to a nice article on the topic that also mentioned http://snurl.com
Have anything to add?
Your shouting time begins now…
May 5, 2008 at 2:54 am |
Its fine to have an option like Tiny Url, but it is always better to avoid using it unless the original URL looks too ugly. I normally do not like to click on a tiny URL
September 1, 2008 at 8:17 pm |
This is stupid, because you could create a wordpress plugin that sets up .htaccess url redirects that use things like, seosos.wordpress.com/tu/1. It’s still shorter than 25 characters, but it has your domain in the URL!