Creating A Custom Short Link

Over the Thanksgiving holiday break when I was supposed to be “not working,” I worked. I did not do anything stressful or work for clients, but I did do some “internal,” as I call it, work. For a while, I have been wanting to create a custom short link. I share a lot of content on social media networks and here on my blog. I primarily use goo.gl (Google Link Shortener) and bit.ly (bitly.com), but I had noticed a couple years ago that other businesses were using custom links. Yes, it took me almost two years to finally do this and I can see you shaking your heads. Please stop. Because HostGator was running Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals that included domain name purchases/registration, I decided to go ahead and get this done. Finally.

If you have wondered how to create a custom short link to share content with, here is what I did to do so:

Bitly offers the capability to use a custom domain name to create short links. Instead of the standard bit.ly/xx12345, you can use cust.om/xx12345. To do this, you must first have a domain name that is not being used for anything else (can be a sub domain). It can also only be 15 characters long, to include the “.” I used Domai.nr, to get suggestions and search for a short domain name to use. Most of the variations of “Colleen Eakins Design” that I was interested in, were already taken, so I decided to just go with my name. In the end, I chose “colleeneakns.me”

The next step, was to go to Bitly and enter the new domain name in as a custom link. You can find this by logging into your Bitly account, clicking on “settings” and then clicking on the “advanced” tab. Once I had it entered, I needed to change my A record for the new domain name to point to Bitly. I can admit that this was a little tricky with HostGator. I must say, that it was easier to make these types of changes with my domain names that I still have under GoDaddy. Minus two points for HostGator. Once that was done and verified with Bitly, I was good to go and geeked to have my “vanity” custom short link. I probably frivolously shared content that day, just so that I could ogle my own link.

Here are a couple [frivolous] links that I found helpful and one irrelevant one:

Bitly Support Page – http://colleeneakns.me/1eJyiOF
Mashable Article – http://colleeneakns.me/1cSxG7i
CED on Facebook – http://colleeneakns.me/1cdQ3W2