Coke announced recently that they now are beginning to use CokeURL.com as a URL Shortener for their brand. I think this is particularly brilliant, so why not have churches and non-profits create one? It’s really easy to do and a very cost-effective way of promoting the brand.
As Mashable says:
With retweeting becoming the currency of Twitter (and perhaps soon Facebook), having your own branded URLs means a lot of potential exposure for your company as users see your URLs instead of those of a conventional URL shortener.
It also could create a perception of trust in the links – i.e., people are more apt to click something that looks like a known brand name than a random 4 or 5 letter combination of letters.
So is this something you’d suggest to your ministry to do? What are your thoughts?
Paul Steinbrueck says
I agree it's a great idea. Its been on my list to for OurChurch.Com for a while now. Pretty sure there are free scripts out there that will take care of everything for you too.
human3rror says
very cool.
Atiba de Souza says
I think this is particularly genius. As church marketers we are into branding and our brand is crucial because it represents Jesus. I've seen a Porn URL in 1 tweet and a church url that both use bit.ly and to the unsuspecting person they may think that bit.ly represents porn and not realize its a generic shortner. maybe we can create a Chirst.ly for churches.
http://twitter.com/AtibadeSouza
Jim says
good idea
kevincooper says
How can URL shortening affect SEO? Since the shorteners use random characters, how will this have an impact?
Paul Steinbrueck says
Kevin, a URL shorter doesn't change the actual URL of any of the pages, so you can still have keywords in your domain, path, and filename to help SEO. But depending on the service it could affect whether those links help your site in search engines.
When someone links directly to a page on your site, that helps it in search engines. But if someone posts a link to the short URL instead, the URL shortening service would have to use a 301 redirect to ensure the short URL passes "link juice" to your site.
Mark Alves says
The random characters won't matter from an anchor text perspective because it's a standalone link pointing elsewhere. If you're using (or developing) a shortener that uses a 301 redirect then you'll still get most of the value of the in-bound link. Here's a recap of which shorteners pass link juice:
http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-sh…
Paul Steinbrueck says
Mark, thanks for the link, that's a great article!
benboles says
Which WordPress URL shortener plugin do you use?
human3rror says
backtype.
KevinRossen says
If your domain is on Google Apps you there's a free option in the Google Solutions Marketplace. Check it out:
http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/view…
I think this is VERY useful for churches for newsletters, bulletins, etc, because the majority of people are kind of intimidated by technology and don't really know what tinyurl or bit.ly is. They may be hesitant to click the link. But if they saw the church's domain built in they probably would click it without hesitation.
Here's a link I did using my personal domain that points back to this blog:
http://go.rossen.net/churchcrunch