Using Bitly

Along with Tineye and Evernote, Bitly is one of my favourite websites for making a comper's life that little bit easier. In a nutshell, Bitly shortens long web links. If you register at www.bitly.com (you can do this easily by logging in via Facebook or Twitter) you can customise link names and track the clicks on your links too. 

I find Bitly really useful for:

• Creating customised short links to popular blog posts, eg. http://bit.ly/NovBlogComps - on Twitter, it gives your followers an idea of your post content even at a quick glance
• Creating links to Facebook pages, photos, comments and Apps - Facebook links are long and full of numbers so shortening them makes them much more user friendly
• Creating a personalised link to an entry in a voting competition, eg. http://bit.ly/VoteBiscuit - this makes it easy to share and remember
• Creating a memorable link to a YouTube video, eg. http://bit.ly/RedHotIceCream
• Tracking how many clicks your links get

When customising, you might find that your preferred keywords have already been used, but you can always adapt your links by adding your initials to the end! 

To explain in more detail how Bitly can be useful for both compers and bloggers, here's my short video tutorial....