I discovered Bitly.Pro the other day, and I can’t believe I missed the early beta invitation to join the free program that gives you your very own personal link-shortening URL.  I sent in a request to be added to the beta program and in three days I received my welcome letter!

As a Bitly.Pro member, you get keen referrer detail:

You also get clicking-by-country, too:

Since I just seeded my Bitly.Pro service, I don’t have a lot of stats yet, but the idea of using my brand for shortening blog and web links for the Boles Blogs Network and beyond — and not Twitter’s t.co or WordPress.com’s wp.me — is tremendously pleasing to me as an entrepreneur.

You need access to two domains for Bitly.Pro to work.  The first is the domain you want to use as a shortener — I chose my Boles.co domain because it is shorter and sweeter and branded to me — and then you need another website you own that is the home “expanded domain” for the domain shortener like WordPress.com is for wp.me and Twitter.com is for t.co.

I used BolesBlogs.com as the second domain, but since I’m publishing across 14 blogs, I don’t really have a landing page that works for all those different URLs.  I’m fine with that as long as “Boles.co” is the link shortener and those links take you to the right blog article.  All is working fine and I am thrilled.

When you have both domains set up with Bitly.Pro — it took me about 10 minutes to get everything changed and properly pointing — you’re good to go.  You login to Bit.ly and every link you shorten is now shortened with your personal domain!

I can shorten links from my Bit.ly dashboard, the chrome extension, or the Bit.ly sidebar.  I set my account to auto-shorten any links.  I simply visit a webpage, open the Bit.ly sidebar and Bit.ly fills in everything for me.  I can add to or change the information as I wish.  I click on the “Share” button and Twitter and Facebook are simultaneously updated:

Here’s how Bitly.Pro looks on my Facebook page:

Here’s how Bitly.Pro looks in the sidebar for a Boles Blogs Network blog:

Finally, this is our Twitter page with the Bitly.Pro Boles.co links live:

You can also create custom Boles.co URLs for linking and you can bundle a bunch of links into a single URL.

Bitly.Pro is a free service and I recommend “burning your own” shortened links if you want to propagate the idea of your brand into the bits of the internet.

9 Comments

    1. It’s a great way to embed the brand, Gordon. I should make all our internal article links Boles.co links too, so we can track who clicks on what!

        1. I wish we had a way to add multiple users to Bitly.Pro so you could also use the Boles.co links. I think that’s a popular feature request, so we’ll see if it happens!

  2. Hey, I noticed those new link addresses, too! Too cool for school! Technology is always changing and sometimes it makes us better by default.

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