bitly

5 Reasons To Use Bitly

November 5, 2014 by Marc Guberti 6 Comments

There are countless tools on the web, but Bitly is one of the best tools on the web for marketers. Chances are you may have heard of Bitly before or have seen the Bitly links in action. Someone you know may even use Bitly. It is a tool that many marketers cannot go without, and if you do not have a Bitly account, here are five reasons why you need to have one.

Bitly shortens your links. The main reason why most people run out of characters on Twitter is because they tweet the entire link. Bitly is the solution to this problem.
Bitly takes a link of any length and turn it into a 20-23 characters link that gives you more characters to play around with on Twitter.
Bitly saves those links. Unlike similar services such as TinyUrl, Bitly saves the links so you can constantly reuse them. If you recycle your social media posts, this is a great feature that will allow you to quickly relocate older articles.
Bitly gives you superior statistics on those links. This third reason is what truly separates Bitly from the other link shortening services. Bitly gives you incredible statistics on your links. You get to see how many clicks you got hour by hour for a whole day as well as how many clicks you got within the hour. You can check how many clicks your Bitly links got for as far as 30 days.
You can categorize your links so they are easier to find. Bitly allows you to put multiple links into one bundle. Creating numerous bundles will allow to categorize your links so you can find them with ease. You can categorize blog posts that you recycle in one bundle and the articles that you want to read in another bundle. There are countless ways to categorize your content on Bitly.
You get to see how popular a link is. Some links are very popular which indicates you should be tweeting them out. Chances are if you tweet a popular link, more followers than usual will click on the link and retweet it to everyone.

Those are the five reasons why you should be using Bitly. What are your thoughts on the list? For the Bitly users out there, do you have any additional reasons why you use Bitly? Please share your thoughts below.

5 Things To Look For In Your Bitly Stats

May 21, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

bitly stats

Bitly is the best place to get your links’ statistics and store those links in a database for free. However, many people only use Bitly to get a shortened URL, and most people do not know all of the statistics that Bitly offers. While it is important to get a shorter URL and track your links, it is also very important to know what Bitly’s statistics mean for you.

I have used Bitly to track my blog’s growth for several years now. I use Bitly’s statistics to identify which links get the most clicks and which links do not generate as many clicks. By using this strategy, I identify which blog posts should still be tweeted and which blog posts should be replaced by another tweet. In order to change your strategy by using Bitly’s statistics, these are the 5 things you need to look for.

Daily clicks for all of your links. How many clicks do you get every day. Bitly shows you how many clicks you got for up to 30 days. You can see when your clicks rose and fell. By figuring out when your clicks dramatically change, you need to identify what you did that day to get the change. If not sending out any tweets for the day resulted in a 50% decrease in clicks, then you need to send out more tweets. If sending out twice as many tweets resulted in a 50% increase in clicks, then you need to schedule more tweets.
Daily clicks for your individual links. These statistics allow you to discover what kind of content your followers and visitors like. If one of your blog posts gets clicked on 10 times more than the others and got promoted just as much as your other links, then you need to continue tweeting about that blog post. If one of your blog posts gets no clicks while your other ones average 20 clicks each, the blog post that got 0 clicks needs to be taken out of your social media strategy.
See what time of day your links get the most clicks. Did you know that you could see how many times your links got clicked in the most recent 24 hours? Whether you want to see how many clicks your link got at 6 am or 3 pm, Bitly allows you to see both. Seeing what times your links get clicked the most on can help you figure out when most people click on those links.
The referrers. Out of all of the clicks I get from Bitly links, 87% of those clicks are from Twitter. By identifying the referrers, you can identify your biggest source of traffic as well as other sources that you need to improve on.
The countries that people live in. Using this statistic will allow you to identify which country contains your largest audience. In addition, you can share links that favor the countries that you get the most visits from. If most of your visitors are from the U.S., tweet once or twice a day about American facts, culture, tradition, or anything else. If most of your visitors are from India, share some things related to India. Those links will probably get clicked on more than some of your other links.

Those are the five things to look for in your Bitly statistics. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional statistics that you look for in Bitly? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

5 Places To Get Good Statistics

November 11, 2013 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I am a big fan of statistics. I use statistics for all of my social networks, all of my YouTube videos, and for this blog as well. These are 10 places that I use to look at my statistics:

WordPress provides so many statistics that it’s mind-boggling. You get to find out how your visitors were referred to your blog, which of your blog posts are the most popular, who’s subscribed to your blog, which countries visitors are from, what people click on once they get to your blog, and search engine terms people use to get to your blog.

You get to see all of the websites and search engines that refer traffic to your blog. My favorite part about this feature is that you also get to see which social networks are referring traffic. I know when Twitter is referring traffic and how many people came from Twitter in a particular day. When you get traffic from Pinterest, you also get to see which pins are referring people to your blog. You also get to see how many times an individual pin gets clicked on.

You also get to see your top posts and pages. If one of your posts is doing very well compared to the others, that is the content your visitors want to see more often. If you write a blog post similar to your popular blog post, that blog post will increase your traffic.

You also get to see which links on your blog are getting clicked. You’ll be able to identify which of your products are the most popular, and this will allow you to learn about where your sales are coming from. You will also be able to learn which of your social network icons is getting clicked on the most.

For blog subscribers, you get to see how long it has been since they subscribed to your blog. You get to see the number of hours, weeks, months, and years since they subscribed to your blog.

Most search engine terms are going to remain as unknown, but some search engine terms will show up. Those are the search engine terms that you should build your blog around, and they should appear as tags on your blog.

2. TwitterCounter is great for Twitter. You get to see how many people followed you on a particular day, the number of people you followed on a particular day, and the number of times you tweeted on a particular day. Free users get access to up to 6 months of their history while Premium users get more features such as statistics for mentions, retweets, and more than 6 months of statistics. TwitterCounter provides all of its users with estimations of when they will reach certain milestones. If you want to know when you will reach 1,000 followers, TwitterCounter will give you an estimate. TwitterCounter’s estimations are based on the average change in followers every week. Higher milestone estimates become available as you get more followers. When you get in the thousands, your milestones are going to be in factors of 500 (8,000 followers, then 8,500 followers, etc). When you reach 10,000 followers, your milestones are going to be in factors of 1,000 (11,000 followers, then 12,000 followers, etc). If you want to reach a certain number of followers before the New Year, looking at the milestones will help you determine if what you are doing right now will allow you to accomplish that goal.

3. PinAuthority is similar to TwitterCounter, but it works for Pinterest. Unlike most places where you can check Pinterest statistics, PinAuthority is free and provides statistics for up to 3 months. However, there are some problems with PinAuthority. The first problem is that once your statistics get updated, they can’t be updated until the next day. The second problem is that you have to manually check in on PinAuthority every day in order to get the statistics that TwitterCounter automatically provides for you. There are paid options that are better than PinAuthority such as Pin Reach, but PinAuthority will provide more statistics than any other free Pinterest statistics site. Pinterest is a new social network, and there aren’t any free Pinterest statistics websites like TwitterCounter just yet.

4. You can’t call yourself a statistics guy or gal if you don’t know about Bitly. Bitly provides statistics for the number of clicks based on intervals of 30 days, 14 days, 7 days, 24 hours, and the past hour. Bitly allows you to see which of your links are popular and where people are clicking those links. Just like WordPress, you get to see all of the referrers, but in addition to seeing the referrers, Bitly organizes the data into a pie chart. Right now, the referral traffic I get from Twitter looks like a Pac-Man compared to my other sources of traffic for my Bitly links. There is also a pie chart that allows you to see which countries these people are coming from. You can even track the statistics for individual links. Bitly provides a lot of amazing statistics, and it’s also a URL shortener for all of those long links.

5. Pin Alerts only offers one statistic, but the statistic they offer is crucial towards success. Pin Alerts sends an email informing you when something on your website gets pinned. You get informed about when your website was pinned, a link to the board that the pin resides, a link to the pin, and the person who pinned your pin. Pin Alerts allows you to receive this information, and if you keep all of Pin Alerts’ emails together, you can create a list of your fans who are on Pinterest. You can follow all of the people who pinned a picture from your website, and you can share the pin since you have the link. If your website has pictures and a Pin It button, then you really need to use Pin Alerts.