How to make your URL links pretty and easy to remember with Pretty Links!

Tl;dr: Check out Pretty Links to make ugly, long URLs short and easy to remember

You have URLs or links for a tonne of pages. Some are really important, like maybe your top blog post… Only the title might be long and hard to remember. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could create custom links… something even you can remember and tell friends and clients? Well, here is a cool thing to learn!

Not only can you do this for your web pages, but you can also use them for ugly affiliate links. I’m going to teach you how to set this up for both.

The tool you need to get now

There is a WordPress tool which I highly recommend called Pretty Links. Huh, what is this witchcraft?

This is a URL ‘redirection tool’. It cleans up your ugly links so they become shorter, easier to share and much easier to remember.

One other useful thing to know is that you can track the number of clicks for each custom link you create. So if you are on stage and say check out XXX URL, you can actually see exactly how many people in the audience were awake, I mean, did as you asked and went to the link. You can do the same on a podcast or Youtube video.

Head over here to get it.

Website links

For your site links, you need this setup. These are your next steps:

1. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins > Add New and add Pretty Links and press “Install.”
2. In Pretty Link press Add New Link!
3. Set Redirection Type to “301 (Permanent).”
4. Paste the URL you want to shrink into the “Target URL” box.
   1. For example: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/askalex-your-startup-strategy-fundraising-scaling-financial/id1324736668?mt=2
5. Set the Pretty Link box to something easy to remember, like “askalexitunes”.
   1. So your link becomes: https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/askalexitunes
6. Do not click “No follow” or “Paramater Forwarding”
7. Enable “Tracking” so you can track how many people click on it
8. Press “Create” at the bottom…

Now you have a pretty, easy to remember URL you can use on your site and even speak in your podcast. Telling your audience your easy-to-remember URL (alexanderjarvis.com/askalexitunes) is much better than tell them to “find me” in iTunes ;).

Here are my settings in Pretty Links.

Affiliate links

If you are setting up an affiliate link to make some passive income, you want to use different settings. No need to get into the boring technical details.

So I use Convertkit for my marketing automation and think it’s pretty cool. I share that and if people like my recommendation I get a referral fee. It doesn’t cost a reader a dime, but it will help cover the costs of all these SaaS’ I have to pay for to run the site, which is a couple of hundred bucks a month!

My affiliate link is ugly and makes no sense. So I use Pretty Links. Now, what are the settings?

It is the same steps above, but you want to click some different buttons.

1. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins > Add New and add Pretty Link and press “Install.”
2. In Pretty Links press Add New Link!
3. Set Redirection Type to “307 (Temporary).”
4. Paste the URL you want to shrink into the “Target URL” box.
   1. For example: https://mbsy.co/convertkit/30148081
5. Set the Pretty Link box to something easy to remember, like “convertkit”.
   1. So your link becomes: https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/convertkit
6. Click “No follow”
7. Do not click “Parameter Forwarding”
8. Enable “Tracking” so you can track how many people click on it
9. Press “Create” at the bottom…

This looks like THIS now when I embed the link into text.

Here are my settings in Pretty Links for affiliate settings:

There are two ways you can use affiliate links:

1. Ones you tell people
2. Ones you embed and want to track

I just explained the first use case, so let’s do the second.

 

If you want to get tricksy like a Hobit… you can. You can make more than one Pretty Link and use them in different places and use tracking to see which ones are working (or not). So you could do this:

• Tell people it: alexanderjarvis.com/convertkit
• Put on your about page: alexanderjarvis.com/convertkit-about
• Put on a resource page: alexanderjarvis.com/convertkit-resource
• Send in your emails: alexanderjarvis.com/convertkit-email

If no one clicks on things, then your page or your pitch sucks and you should think about testing something new! Data is fab!

Get on and use it!