Two Easy Ways to Get Short Links

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Two Easy Ways to Get Short Links

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Don’t burden your readers with hulky, bulky, intolerably long URLs.

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by MATT STOKES | NOVEMBER 1, 2016

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A Long, Long URL
Got all that?

News broke yesterday that Twitter will most likely stop counting links and photos against the 140-character limit of every Tweet. The 140-character limit has inspired many workarounds such as screenshots of longer messages, but the innovation that has really taken off is the short link.

If you’re unfamiliar with them, short links are, well, short links. Rather than Tweeting a URL that might take up all of your space (https://rothstokes.com/2016/05/two-easy-ways-to-get-short-links/), you can convert it into a short link (bit.ly/1OBscpr) that usually has 15 or fewer characters.

But while Twitter will start allowing long links, short links are still quite useful, For one thing, they just look better. What’s more, brevity is still key in all content—you want to say what you have to say in as little space as possible.

How To Make a Short Link

There are many different apps and websites that will generate short links, but my go-to is Bitly. Simply go to their website, bit.ly, paste your URL, and they’ll instantly generate a unique, permanent, short link for you. It’s that simple.

Bitly's Short Link Generator
Bitly’s Short Link Generator

There are many, many alternatives to Bitly, but the one with which I am most familiar is Google’s URL Shortener. You can go directly to URL Shortener by going to goo.gl. Google’s app works just as quickly and easily as Bitly’s, and I use one over the other only out of habit.

Google's URL Shortener
Google’s URL Shortener

So ladies and gentlemen, I implore you, take advantage of this most wondrous technology that is the short link, and let us do away with the abominable eyesore that is the long URL.

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