Surely on some occasion while you are on the Internet you have seen addresses that are incomplete in the navigation bar; This is very common when blogging with articles with long titles is created, they are pages that few people can remember to share or make future visits to solve them. Some companies have emerged that are dedicated to shortening URLs or personalizing links; In order that any user can remember them much more easily, Bitly provides this service, here we show you how to create a link using Bitly.
What is Bitly and what is it used for?
Bitly Inc, is a company that offers link reduction service, which covered the growing need to reduce URLs (between 10 and 20 characters) in microblogging networks such as Twitter, which for a long time limited its publications to 140 characters (currently allows 280); Bitly being the perfect tool to make the most of the words in each tweet.
How are the links shortened in Bitly?
To better understand what a shortened link looks like, we will first put as an example a Wikipedia article with a very long URL in its version with Bitly’s shortener service:
- https://bit.ly/3lPfYMe
The result is seen with the naked eye, it is much easier to remember the Bitly link than the original Wikipedia URL; However, it is better to have a reduced link that is also personalized, since this type of link contains descriptive words, instead of an alphanumeric code.
How to create a shortened and custom link using Bitly?
To create a link, link or URL for social networks with the Bitly shortener, you just have to enter the page https://bitly.com/, place the address in the text field, visible in the center of the site and press the button Blue shorten next to him; after that we will see a box below with the original link, the new one from Bitly and a “Copy” button to copy the shortened link.
We can create several short links for free; But for cases where the need for short links is great, this company has plans that offer other advantages; as well as tools that a free account does not have; You can see more details at the following web address: https://bitly.com/pages/pricing.
To create a custom link in Bitly; The first thing you must do is enter your user account, if you do not have one, you must register on the page by pressing the “Sign up” button; You will see 3 available plans but choose the one that says “Get started for free”, to go to a registration form where you will enter a username, your email and password.
Then you will have to select your type of sector or economic activity from a list and answer 3 additional questions about the use that you will give to the account (personal, professional or both), the type of company and tasks that you carry out in your work; Upon completion you will receive a message in your email with a link that you must press to confirm its validity and that’s it.
Having your account registered; you enter your Bitly account and create the shortened link in the way we have already explained. For example we can put the URL https://www.google.com/ and as a result we will have https://bit.ly/2VIkdhu; To customize any link we just have to select it with the mouse and automatically the same field becomes editable.
Which means that we can put the name of the link to our liking; as long as it does not exceed the character limit it does not contain some special characters; that are not allowed in URLs and is available (there cannot be 2 identical links on the Internet); Continuing with the previous example, we can customize the link to https://bit.ly/google-example.
We finish the process by pressing the orange “SAVE” button; above we will find the buttons to copy and share the link on our website or on social networks (“COPY” and “SHARE” respectively); giving us a great advantage because this kind of URL is massively shared for its simplicity. You already know how you can create a link using Bitly.