Make Money By Shortening Links

Upfront I feel that I should mention that while I tested dozen different services over past few years, I currently opt to not use them. I will explain why, and I will also point you to a couple of the best ones should you choose to use them anyway.

URL shortener is service that masks your links and generally allows you to see how many times that specific link was clicked. Some offer more options and better click tracking.. Free ones like bit.ly or goo.gl do not do anything but send person who clicked to intended destination. URL shorteners that pay you for using them force ads on your traffic first.


First thing you need to understand is that if you would normally send X amount of traffic to original link and get 100 hits, you can expect less than 20, perhaps as few as less than 5, if you place ad roadblock in their way.

Some might be using ad blockers, flash blockers, script blockers that they do not know how to modify and will simply never be able to proceed. Others will see ad and right away click off. And odds are that that traffic you just lost will never come back to your website, and if you chose to do it on the forum, some amount of them might report you.

Another very large problem is that majority of paid URL shorteners do not seem to care what kind of ads they will show your traffic. That means that you might be shortening URL to Disney website and sharing it to children and parents, yet they might show them hardcore pornography ads, or otherwise disturbing to young children imagery.

So should you choose to try this method of making money online I strongly suggest that you stick to targeting thick skinned demographic and that you let them know upfront what to expect, perhaps by linking video on how to perform action needed to proceed (usually its "wait 5 sec then click on continue type link").

You should also be aware that chaining paid URL shorteners is usually prohibited in Terms of Service and will get your accounts banned. To properly do it you should only use one, once, per link.

To make this as self explanatory as possible, I shortened links to URL shorteners using their own service, so you can see exactly what to expect.

Click on these links to try the only two paid URL shorteners I can suggest. Others were just far below any standards I tried to set:

Adfly

Shortest

Oh, and I should also mention that they both have affiliate programs paying you about 20% of whatever your referrals earn (they lose nothing, its just your bonus).