Pro Tip: Cheap White Label Link Shortener

You’ve probably encountered them… bit.ly, amzn.to… followed by a slash and then a word or a jumble of a few letters and numbers. They’re called short links. I regularly use bit.ly/hell5book as a short link for my novel’s page on Amazon.

I realized I’ll need a lot of shortlinks for Bulmash Media next year, but I wanted fine-grained control and insight on my shortlinks without a huge investment. At the time of writing, Namecheap is showing get.me as being available… for $49,999. The cheapest bit.ly plan that lets you bring your own domain is hundreds a year.

Quick Vocabulary

TLD: A “top level domain,” it’s the 2 or more characters on the right-side of the dot. Common TLDs are .com, .io, .net…

Domain name: The part on the left side. In bulmash.com, bulmash is the domain name and .com is the TLD.

3+2: This is a 3-letter domain name and a 2-letter TLD.

Link shortener: Put in a long link to anything, get back a shorter link. They’re easy to use, easy to remember, and I can bury all my UTM tags and/or affiliate IDs in them so I get better analytics while keeping the web address in the link short and simple.

Step 1: Get a 3+2 domain for under $10 a year

Domain names in the .im TLD (Isle of Man) are available on NameCheap for ~$9 a year and there are three-letter domain names still available without having to pay a “premium” fee or buy one from a squatter. I got dul.im. According to Google, ‘dul’ means ‘go’ in Irish, the Isle of Man is in the Irish Sea… serendipity.

With the discount on the first year, it was $42.40 for a 5-year registration. That’s an easyish to remember 3+2 domain for $8.48 a year.

Step 2: Short.io’s free tier

Short.io allows you to have a custom domain on their free tier. If you’re bootstrapping, this tier is fine, because at 1,000 different links (max) and 50k tracked clickthroughs a month, it will probably take a while to outgrow the free tier. Barring some sort of attack, 50k clicks a month on my short links would indicate enough success to afford the next higher paid tier. Furthermore, the service has been around since 2015, so it’s less likely to go under without warning like some startups.

If it does, since I own the domain and have a list of my shortlinks, it’s a few hours to toss up a minimally functional replacement in cheap hosting so I don’t lose all the clicks while I get a better option. My cheap and dirty solution would do little to record analytics, but it would keep the links functioning.

If you know how to create an A name entry for your DNS config, you can point the domain at their servers, then wait an hour or so for them to generate and install a LetsEncrypt certificate so https links work, and then start using it.

One Warning

Just remember that your short links may live longer than your domain registration. When I worked for IMDb, we got a note from a user that they’d clicked the official site link for the movie “In & Out” (a fun 90s comedy starring Kevin Kline) and ended up at a porn site. That’s because the studio let the domain name registration lapse once the film was out of theaters. Some enterprising porn entrepreneur grabbed the domain and now there were hundreds of movie sites linking to his porn site without realizing it.

If you do this, please reserve your domain for a few years and be ready to extend that so your links don’t someday point to something you wouldn’t find okay.

Want a step-by-step?

If you’d like a step-by-step tutorial, leave a comment below to encourage me to make one.

I get no affiliate revenues from Short.io or Namecheap. I am sharing something I figured out to help others. If I end up signing up with either and changing to affiliate links, I’ll remove this line.