The #1 Alternative (FREE) to Bit.ly, Goo.gl and TinyURL
The #1 Alternative (FREE) to Bit.ly, Goo.gl and TinyURL
Google URL shortener was closed in March 2019, since then everyone is looking for a good alternative.
flipmsg is happy to announce its new URL shortening service called ‘Flipmsg Shortlinks’.
This url shortener allows you to drop affiliate cookies and build an online business while you redirect traffic through the web.
It’s easy to use and it provides robust analytics.
What is a URL shortener? A URL shortener is a service that allows you to shorten your links, make them smaller, it also allows you to insert words and characters to the back name of the link which makes the link much more clickable.
Some URL shorteners allow you to Brand your links with your own domain name.
- Flipmsg Shortlinks (The best all-around free URL Shortener, allows you to make money online from your links)
- Bitly (good and simple)
- Tinyurl (old and trusted)
- Rebrandly - allows you to brand your links with your own domain name
- Snip.ly
In this article we give you at least 12 alternatives to google url shortener.
Flipmsg Shortlinks (Flipmsg.com URL Shortener)
Flipmsg Shortlinks - The URL Shortener That Makes You Money
Flipmsg, what makes it the best URL shortener out there?
Easy to read Analytics:
Flipmsg url shortener has a great built-in analytics, with attractive and nice graphs, it can show you where your visitors are coming from, who are the top referrers, which domains are referring visitors through your link, and from what countries your visitors are coming from.
Traffic Quality Score:
Flipmsg shortlinks automatically calculates your traffic quality score for you, it takes into consideration known and unknown traffic sources, and tiers of traffic, including tier1 English and non-English countries, tier 2 countries, and tier 3 countries, and outputs a quality score for your traffic automatically and for free.
It can be great for traffic exchange programs. Like email ad swaps.
Make Money Online:
Flipmsg Shortlinks is the only service that allows you to make money from your shortlinks.
How does it work?
‘Flipmsg shortlinks’ allows you to build an online affiliate business (based on affiliate marketing) while redirecting traffic to any destination you like on the web.
what is an online affiliate business you probably ask?
Many people want to make money online, but there aren’t many good options to build an online business easily today, without upfront investment and risk, and without a steep learning curve. flipmsg gives users the ability to build an easy to use online business and earn long-term affiliate commissions.
What is an ‘Affiliate Business’?
An Affiliate Business is a business that consists of affiliate referrals, affiliate referrals are users you refer with your affiliate link or with the Flipmsg URL shortener, we drop a 360-day affiliate cookie on the users you refer via the short link, and when they sign up for a free flipmsg account they become your affiliate referrals in your online affiliate business.
With an affiliate business, your goal is to have as many affiliate referrals as you can, the more referrals you have the more affiliate commissions you can earn.
Then you can earn up to 50% recurring affiliate commissions for life from your referrals, on account upgrades, support coins for content creators, and advertising credits.
But this a broad topic for another article.
In short… flipmsg shortlinks allows you to drop affiliate cookies while redirecting traffic to your selected destinations.
This way your gain affiliate referrals inside your affiliate business (you need to open a free flipmsg account)
For more details open a flipmsg account and check the affiliate business section.
Affiliate Commissions:
With flipmsg you can earn up to 50% recurring monthly commissions from your online business referrals.
These commissions come from support coins for content creators, account upgrades, and advertising!.
When driving traffic with your short links you drop affiliate cookies on all of the visitors that come through your short link.
Poll Short Links:
Flipmsg URL Shortener also allows you to create poll links, poll links are short links that allow you to ask a question and offer few possible answers, you can attach a different link for each answer, each link can have its own parameters, and it can lead to different destinations.
For example:
Do you like [Blank]?
1.YES - takes the user to an opt-in page
2.NO - takes the user to an upsell page.
You can add up to 7 different possible answers per link with 7 different destinations and parameters.
This is another important feature the flipmsg URL shortener has.
Bitly
Bitly | Custom URL Shortener, Link Management & Branded Links
Bitly is a simple URL shortening service that allows you to create simple short links, one of its main advantages is that most people are familiar with bitly and won’t hesitate to click on a bitly link.
With the free plan, you can have up to 50 custom non-branded links per month.
It can show you top referrers, the origin of traffic with simple and nice graphs. You can also upgrade to the paid plan.
If you upgrade to the paid plan for $30 per month you can have up to 1500 non-branded short links, and 1 custom domain link.
With the enterprise plan, you can have up to 100 branded links, and 3000 custom non-branded links, and you can receive analytic data not only about the country of origin of your visitors but also their city of origin.
With custom domains, you can create unique short links that identify your brand, build trust, and boost your clickthrough rates.
Bitly is great for users who want to create short links on the fly or for businesses that want to brand their business and build trust in the marketplace.
Rebrandly
Rebrandly | Custom URL Shortener, Branded Link Management, API
Rebrandly gives you the biggest number of custom domains with the free plan. more than any other service, up to 5 custom domains, but it limits you to only 5000 clicks per month on all of your links.
Another great feature of Rebrandly is that it allows you to edit your link destination after you create it, something you can not do with bitly, here in flipmsg we are going to add this feature soon.
It’s very important to be able to edit the link after creation in the case you forgot some URL parameters, or in the case, the destination URL has been changed, for example, paid campaigns, or when you want to save old stats.
Using custom domains can help you strengthen your brand on social media, for example using a custom domain link on Instagram, Facebook, youtube, or twitter.
TinyURL
TinyURL.com - shorten that long URL into a tiny URL
TinyURL is one of the oldest players on the market, created in 2002, it is a free URL shortener service without any paid option, it is a very simple service that allows you to create short URLs on the fly without any hassle. It has a bookmarklet, a piece of javascript code that you can add to your browser toolbar, with this tool you can create short links from any page on the web.
Although TinyURL is free and easy to use, it doesn’t have any analytics data or dashboard and it is featureless.
One of the advantages of TinyURL is that people know and trust these URLs which can have a positive impact on the clickthrough rate.
Hyperlink
Get push notifications when your links get clicked on
Hyperlink is a unique URL shortener that allows you to receive push notifications whenever someone is clicking on your link, you can also choose to send these notifications once a day or every hour if it’s too pushy for you.
With the premium plan of $10 per month, you can also use your own custom domain name to brand your links.
Hyperlink comes with mobile apps for android and iOS.
URL Shortener By Zapier
URL Shortener by Zapier - Get to know URL Shortener by Zapier
Zapier has it’s own URL shortener now which integrates with its tools, what’s great about zapier is that you can integrate their URL shortener with all the tools they offer like google sheets, slack, flicker , mail chimp, google drive, twitter, you name it. With a single line of code.
And best of all it’s free.
Snip.ly
Sniply: Social Media Conversion | Home
Sniply is a service that allows you to create short links with a call to action, the service uses an iframe to host your destination URL, and add a custom call to action to the bottom of the page.
This way you can bring back people to your site after they visit the destination page.
How is this useful? Maybe you want your audience to come back to your blog after they read an article, maybe you want them to visit a sales page or an opt-in page after they visited your blog post, maybe you send them to another website and then you want them to go to your own website.
Maybe you want them to visit your social media account after they have visited a blog post, first, you can build trust with them and then you can send them wherever you want.
Another use of this feature is to drive people to a sales funnel or a sales channel to drive sales after they have viewed a video on your website, or after they have read a blog post, you can even use other people’s blog posts to promote your own products and services.
Another case use is to send people to a blog post, and then redirect them to an affiliate offer... The sky's the limit.
Snips are the bars on the side that have a call to action, there are different types of snips you can create, for example, text snip, image snip, button snip, form snip.
With text snip, you can add a text call to action and take a user wherever you want.
With button snip, you can create a call to action button, and with image snip, you can add an image or a banner to draw people’s attention.
You can create custom colors and even add your brand image or personal image. With custom colors, you can control the look and feel of your snip.
With a form snip, you can collect visitor’s emails and build an email list, this is a very powerful way to build your email list.
You can position the snip anywhere you want on the screen with simple select dropdown options.
Like any other URL shortener, you can edit and change the back name of the link to create a custom link with your own call to action in the back name of the link.
If you upgrade your account you have the option to remove the sniply logo (hide logo option).
If you upgrade your account you also have the option to use your own custom domain.
Conversion Tracking
With conversion tracking, you can track not only clicks on your link but also click through rates on your snips, in addition, you can add a conversion pixel (a small piece of code) in your thank you pages that allows you to track conversions, whether it’s sales, or opt-ins or anything you want to track.
And with A/B testing you can even split test your different snips for different clickthrough rates and different conversion rates.
Analytics
With sniply analytics, you can track clicks, bounce rates, time on a page, pages per visit on a website.
You can segment analytics by brand, the number of brand profiles you can create depends on your account type, you can also segment by call-to-action.
A/B testing allows you to measure the effectiveness of different calls to actions, different colors, different styles, different images etc..
You can add variations into a campaign, and the variations will automatically rotate evenly, if you drive enough traffic you will be able to see which variation performs the best.
Unfortunately, sniply is not free, the price starts at $29 per month, and you are limited to 5000 clicks per month, if you want to perform A/B testing or drive a higher volume of traffic you will need to upgrade to the pro plan which allows you to perform split testing between different call to actions and also drive 25,000 visitors through your links. With the business plan at $149 per month you can also use your own custom domain name.
POLR URL Shortener - Open Source Project
Polr is an open source and free url shortener that allows you to host your own service on your own domain!, it’s fast and simple to use with a robust API.
You can try out a demo version of it here.
You can make the url public or private with password protection.
YOURLS - Another Self Hosted URL Shortener
YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener
Another great open source url shortener that allows you to host your own service on your domain.
it has great analytics , you can see clicks, referring domains ,and visitors geo-location. And best of all it’s free.
Anchr.io
Anchr.io - Open-Source Bookmarks Manager, Image Upload and Shortlink Service
Anchr.io allows you to save links from the web as collections of links, it has a chrome browser extension that allows you to save the links from anywhere on the web.
It also has the ability to upload images easily, with images you can encrypt them with passwords, so they become private, nobody will be able to view the images without a password. You can share them with friends ,forums or on social media.
Hive Shortener
Hive | URL Shortener, Custom Links & Link Analytics
The hive url shortener allows you to create short links and to share them, synchronize your links with your account, see short history for each link with a glimpse , tag your links and sort them by favorites.
It has good analytics features like click count, geographic locations, referrers , you can even see who shared your link.
Add modals(pop-ups) to your short link, create a custom branded domain that allows you to get up to 34% more clicks on your links.
You can create password protection for your links and an alias if needed.
You can perform a redirect based on country or redirect based on a device (like mobile, tablet, desktop)
You can even give a description to each link.
Shorte.st
Earn money on short links. Make short links and earn the biggest money - Shorte.st links
Shorte.st url shortener is a unique shortener that allows you to make money from your links.
The way it works is by using an intermediate page that displays ads to visitors that visit your link, they need to view an ad/page before they can continue to their destination, this allows you to earn from advertising.
This is a great way to monetize a blog or a youtube channel, or even an email list, or your social media pages/accounts, if you can drive traffic on a regular basis you can make a decent amount of money from that traffic.
Flipmsg is not allowing you to earn from ads at this moment, but in the future we are going to add this feature!, you will be able to earn from advertising , from clicks and views!
For now you build a long-term asset(online business) with flipmsg, you accumulate referrals and then you can earn passive income from them on a monthly basis.
The more referrals you have the more potential you have to earn.
The problem with url shorteners that give you the ability to earn from advertising is that you need to repeatedly drive traffic through these links to earn a small amount of money, usually you earn per 1000 views on the ad pages, and it's a very small amount.
With flipmsg affiliate business on the other hand you accumulate referrals (this is a one time effort), build an online business(a long-term asset) that allows you to earn passive income from account upgrades, ad credits and coins for content creators, you build it once and it pays you forever!