How does a URL shortener make money?
Many bloggers, website owners, social media players, players on question-answer websites, and even forums usually find that it is so difficult to get paid by sharing affiliate links, posting articles, answering questions, and more engagement online. This article URL Shortener – the Ultimate Guide to Earn Quick Money in 2019 to Monetize Links in 2019 will provide you one more fast way of monetizing the links you share in a comparatively short period.
In Quora, the most renowned Q&A website in the world, there’re many questions and answers related to the URL shortener. Thus, you’re free to go check them out. But here, I’d like to make something kind of collection. So, right now, let’s dive in with the secrecy of utilizing a URL shortener to make money.
What is a URL shortener?
A URL shortener is a tool, a software or a website that can shrink and trim down the long URLs (the plural form of Uniform Resource Locator), track links you share and provide you detailed data and analysis of these links. The principal aim of a URL shortener is to keep long web page addresses into short ones that people can easily remember.
Meanwhile, URL shortener acts like an intermediary between the original web page links and the link that you’re supposed to paste or compile in targeted posts, social media platforms, blogs or articles. The URL shortener will also keep connections between the raw URL and the new link by the act of redirection. That means that anyone clicks a link that tackled with URL shortener will firstly visit the URL shortener provider, and then the original web page link.
3 uses of URL shorteners
When speaking of the usage of URL shorteners, we usually mention 2 uses.
- Shrinking URLs. When you want to share something by texts on social media platforms, you can directly past the URLs of the web pages that you want to share. But, these links are too long, making people think of spam information. Thus, by using URL shorteners, you can make these URLs much more neat and shorter.
- Track Links and URLs. There’re many ways of making money online and affiliate marketing is one of them. But it is difficult to track these links and URLs you share on your blog posts, articles, and social media platforms. Yes, of course, you can install some plug-ins or use some software to track these links, but many of them are paid versions. What’s more, you won’t know which affiliate link or referral link your affiliate revenue comes from.
A URL shortener can solve the problems that we just mentioned. URL shorteners can create beautiful links and help you track these links. And you will see the data analysis of your income and traffic on these URL shorteners.
- Hiding URL. When you click the disguised URL tacked by the URL shorteners, you will never know where you will be redirected to. Thus, some will take advantage of this feature to hide URLs.
How does a URL shortener make money?
How does a URL shortener make money? This is an internal issue that outsiders often don’t know. But let’s make some speculations here.
- Gathering and selling data. The URL shorteners can make money by collecting, analyzing, remaking and reselling industrial data and statistics about those websites that value the results and insights.
- Those URL shorteners can also get an overview of what kind of URLs are shortened, who made clicks on their platforms when the users clicked their sites, and other demographics saved via cookie tags.
- Many businesses will place advertisements on the URL shorteners. Thus, those URL shorteners can charge a monthly membership fee. They can also make money from advertisers because many advertisers will pay them to increase traffic to their websites or apps. Parts of those fees go to the URL shortener, and the rest goes to those who promote cut links to get money.
Will SEO be affected by the URL shortener?
Yes, there’re active and negative effects. Normally, those who want to take advantage of URL shorteners will concern about spamming and malicious redirections. Let me figure it out.
Spamming and redirections of URL shorteners
Because the URL shorteners will hide the original URLs, spammers think that it is open to doing their businesses. Spammers can hide their harmful URLs in URL shorteners, so people will be redirected to unwanted websites. This causes problems because it makes readers lose their trust in your links and URLs, so they will probably never read your posts, blogs or twits. But you can use an online tool to monitor where these shortened URLs go by visiting the website where does this link goes.
If you’re coping with 301 redirections on your websites, which happen so often, you might encounter problems in terms of indexing. Some search engines, like Yahoo and Bing, have already released relevant information about getting confused by bad redirects, including non-existing indexing.
A URL shortener also leads to link juice.
According to several ranking specialists, it seems that URL shorteners don’t lead to any negative impacts on SEO. Trimmed URLs are considered by search engines link-friendly, just as normal 301 redirects. Matt Cutt from Google explains in a video on Youtube that “if we try to crawl a page and we see a 302 or permanent redirect, which pretty much all well-behaved URL shorteners (like Bitly) will do, it will pass Page Rank to the final destination”.
The best way of utilizing URL shorteners is sharing natural content as much as you can by your own hands.
What are the advantages of using a URL shortener?
As we have mentioned above, here I’m making a list of all the advantages of using URL shorteners.
- Streamline and making your link neatly. When you sharing something with pasting a long-tail link directly on a social media platform, it looks like spam and deters others to click on it. For example, when you share an affiliate product via the Amazon affiliate program, the URL of the product you want to share in a blog post or a video is too long. It is not user-friendly and it results from a confusion of viewers (refer to No. 1 section in this screenshot down below ).
The function of URL shorteners is trimming down these long links into shorter links that are user-friendly. That’s why the Amazon affiliate program has its amzn.to program to trim down long affiliate links. (refer to No. 2 section in the screenshot above).
For some kind of contents or pieces of information you want to share, it’s important to keep links short because you have to leave enough space for the whole text. Let’s say, tweets. As you know, a tweet can only contain 1400 characters.
- Data tracking and analysis. When talking about affiliate marketing, I believe that many people get income from affiliate links but never know which link other viewers clicked. URL shorteners can help affiliate marketers with tracking each affiliate link’s performance and analytics, which further provides information about the traffic of contents.
- Making money. You can make money each time a single link gets clicked. I’ve explained in previous texts that some companies will advertise on those URL shorteners. While these URL shorteners will split their ads income to those who promote their services, use their tools to shrink links, or spread their services by posting banners on blog posts or social media platforms.
How to use a URL shortener to earn money?
Now you’ve got an overview of how URL shorteners work, let’s get to the key point – how to use a URL shortener to earn money?
Firstly, I have to say not all URL shorteners allow you to earn money. Only paid URL shorteners to pay you.
Read this for unpaid URL Shorteners:
Right now we only pay attention to those paid URL shorteners that allow you to get paid by sharing shorten URLs, referral programs, and other promotional campaigns.
Let me recap the process of how you get paid with a diagram down here.
Perhaps right now, you’ve completely known how to use a URL shortener to earn money.
The best thing about making money via a URL shortener is that once you create the shortened URL and embed it in any content that you share or write, you’re shaping your passive income gradually. For instance, if you write an article and put in it on a platform where traffic is not a problem, then maybe viewers will see it and click the shortened URLs that included in the contents, then you’ll receive income from those paid URL shorteners consistently. Now, let’s dive into the next part – the best URL shorteners to earn money online. We will make an example by Linkvertise.
How to earn money on a URL shortener(Linkvertise)
In this part, we’re talking about how to earn money on a URL shortener and I’ll take the German website Linkvertise as an example.
Register on Linkvertise and change the language
- First, you need to visit the website of the Linkvertise. Please refer to the screenshot down below.
- Next step, we need to register our account on this website by clicking the register button, just as the highlighted part in the screenshot above. Then you should fill in your personal information in the pop-up form. Tick both options and click Register Now option.
After registration, you will receive a notice, telling you that you’ve already succeeded in registering on their website. And you will be redirected to down below screenshot.
- As you can see the language of this screen is Germany, if you don’t know anything about the language of Germany, you can shift the language by clicking the flag icon.
Then you will be redirected to a new dashboard in English.
Make Settings on Dashboard of Linkvertise
Let’s check options out here.
- Click to read notification pushes. Maybe the most important part here is the Linkvertise Guidelines.
- This is the main zone that you can check out your balances and the links you created and get clicked.
You can also see “your income” just down below part 2, where you can check the income during the past 7 days, 30 days or even 1 year.
- Full Script API. If your website contains so many external links and you want to monetize all of them, then you might think about activating this option. Please check the photo down here.
There’re descriptions and you can also watch the explanation videos as well. After clicking the button of “Activate Full Script API”, you will be redirected to the following page.
You can embed the script between the <head> and </head> part on your website, or you can download the corresponding WordPress Plugin if you run a WordPress website (Please refer to the article如何在SiteGround上做WordPress网站 if you want to create a website on the best web hosting SiteGround ).
- Payouts. This is the most important part for you if you want to earn money via URL shorteners because the passive income will go into your accounts. So you have to make them right.
As we can see from the screenshot down below, Linkvertise provides 4 ways of receiving money – PayPal, Paysafecard, Payoneer, and Bank Transfer. You should make the settings right.
Please note that unless you’ve already driven clicks, then you can withdraw the money to your account that mentioned above, to your 4 types of account.
But you’re able to make settings on Automatic Monthly Payout. You can only make settings on PayPal and Bank Transfer because only these 2 options are enabled (See photo down below).
Go ahead choose your country and input your PayPal email address, so that you can receive payment via PayPal. From the point you make settings of your accounts to receive automatic income from Linkvertise, you’ve already started your way to passive income.
- Affiliate Program. Many online marketers love affiliate marketing, then you can’t miss this affiliate program. So, go ahead to click the affiliate program button here. You will see your affiliate link (please see the circled part in the screenshot down below). And you can start to promote this referral URL to attract more customers.
You will see it says that “refer new customers and receive 5% of their incomes”.
Create a shortened link on Linkvertise
Now let’s create a shortened link on Linkvertise. Find and click the “Create Link” button on the top right of your dashboard. And you will see such a screenshot.
In the “your target URL” part, you have to input or paste the URL you want to trim down. Please pay attention here that URL only forms like https://xxx.com or http://www.xxx.net (.net/.cn/.uk and more) and www.xxx.com (for instance) is not accepted.
For the official website of Linkvertise has already concluded a How to create a Linkvertise link page, I will just make an example here.
I’d like to answer students’ questions about university students’ entrepreneurial projects on Chinese Quora – Zhihu. I’m searching on the internet and found the article – 17 Business Ideas for College Students for 2020.
I’m going to shorten the URL of this article and paste the shortened URL on Zhihu to answer questions. See the steps I did it here.
- Input the URL of the URL and click the Continue button.
- Configure the Link. I’ll input contents after the word “business ideas students”. Meanwhile, you should pay attention to the underlined part because it has word limits.
Then, we click the Continue button.
- Setting the redirect URL. The part marked with number 1 has 3 options, and you can choose either of them. For the part marked with number 2, I choose “student” as a link ending (this part only accepts a single number and a word).
Next, I clicked the Continue button.
- Ad-Settings. You don’t have to configure anything in this part. Just directly click the Create link button.
Finally, a shortened link is created. And I will directly use this URL by copying with it (Ctrl+C on the keyboard).
Then I’ll search the keyword student business in Zhihu and answer questions with embedding the shortened link. So when other views see your answer and click the link, you will get paid.
Now, you’ve already created a shortened link, it’s time to share it on your posts, tweets, and other places so as content viewers can click your shortened link. And meanwhile, you get paid (see how I did on the photo above).
There’re many paid URL shorteners in the world. I’ll list some of them, so you can register on them and start to earn money online via these URL shorteners.
List of high paying URL shorters
In this list, I will only list those URL shorteners that common users can earn money on. Please come check them out.
Linkvertise.net
Linkvertise, a Germany URL shortener, is one of the highest paying URL shorteners because they provide up to €10 for every 1000 views for just trimming down the link and whenever someone clicks on that link, you earn money.
But they also offer you to earn some extra cash up to €70 for every 1000 views but they have some tasks which must be done to earn money. This sometimes gets messed up but if you have a great strategy to work, you can easily earn massive revenue from this network.
If you are targeted to European areas, you should choose Linkvertise as your URL shortener.
Payout Info
- You can earn money on every click conducted by visitors.
- You earn 8-11 € per 1000 views.
- Easy dashboard.
- Monthly payments are made via PayPal, Paysafecard or Amazon voucher for a minimum of 10 €
Shorte.st
If you want to earn quick money online, the shorte.st is the quickest way of monetizing the links you posted and shared. This website is perhaps the most famous one known in the world.
If you are targeted to developed areas, let’s say Europe and America, and then you can choose Shorte.st as your URL shortener.
Shorte.st is renowned for its little strict in maintaining quality, therefore you need to set up a great strategy to advertise with them.
Meanwhile, it has an affiliate program that allows you to get 20% of your targeted clicker makes 100. That is to say, you can get 20 USD.
Payout info
- Payment Method: PayPal, Payoneer, and WebMoney
- Minimum Payout: $5 for PayPal, $20 for Payoneer and $5 for WebMoney
- The Rate of Referral Earning: 20% Commission on Referrals forever.
UIZ.IO
Many online users maybe know little about UIZ.io, but it claims that multiple views from the same IP are also counted and considered as effective clicks. And users are required to earn only 5 USD before getting paid.
UIZ has a total of 8,400,000 clicks and 9,000 registered users worldwide. The top regions that got the highest payment from UIZ are Greenland, Switzerland, New Zealand, and Denmark. The second tier countries contain Australia, Sweden, Norway, the United States, and the United Kingdom. For more detailed information and payout rates, please refer to the Payout Rates page of UIZ.
Generally speaking, if you’re from other countries other than European or American, I’d like to recommend this URL shortener to you.
Payout Info
- Withdraws generate automatically every Monday if you reach the minimum amount. The minimum withdrawal is $5. We pay within 24-72 hours.
- Users can receive payments via PayPal, Bitcoin, Webmoney, and Payeer.
- Multiple views from the same IP are also counted. Now it’s 3 paid unique views per IP within 24h (not from one visitor).
- The traffic types they shall not pay include Adblock visitors, any bots/botnets activity, proxy/VPN/tor traffic and any attempts to hide a real IP, multiply clicks for increasing revenue, nor unique (within 24h) visits by one visitor.
Shrinkearn.com
Shrinkearn.com is a high-rated URL shortener among the online communities, no matter on Quora or single posts. The administration panel of Shrinkearn is neat and user-friendly. The minimum payment amount is only 5 USD, that is to say, as long as your account reaches 5 USD, then you can withdraw it.
Shrinkearn.com claims that it has a total of 211,099 registered users, 9,739,468 total links, and 11,180,410 total clicks on their official website.
The top countries with the highest payment are Greenland, Iceland, San Marino. If viewers from these 3 nations click your shortened URL, then you can get more than 10-20 USD per 1000 views.
Payout Info
- Minimum Payout: $5
- Payment Frequency: Daily (within 24 hours)
- Payment Methods: PayPal, WebMoney, Payeer, Skrill, UPI and Bank Transfer
- Share your referral link with your friends and earn 25% of their earnings for life.
Adf.ly
Adf.ly is one of the most traditional and renowned URL shorteners since the day they popped up. It is a great link shortener. It offers users to earn up to 14 USD for every 1000 views.
Meanwhile, Adf.ly provides referral programs (affiliate program) as well. If users share their affiliate links to friends, they will receive 20% of their earnings for life.
Earnings can be automatically paid before midnight on the next payment date if your earnings have reached a total of $5.00 or more. Please note, Payoneer currently has a minimum withdrawal of $10.
Pay Info
- Payment Mode: Paypal or Payoneer
- Minimum Payout: $5
- The Rate of Referral Earning: 20% Commission on Referrals for Lifetime
- PayPal, Payoneer, Bank Transfer, Prepaid Card are accepted
Shrtfly.com
Shirtfly.com has almost every function another URL shortener has, but the biggest difference is that its referral amount is 30% of each link your viewers promote. This means that if one of your audiences promotes and earn 100 USD per 1000 views, and then you can get 30 USD from it.
What’s more, when your earnings reach 10 USD, then you can withdraw your money to your accounts.
The statistics of shrtfly is 0.4 billion total clicks, 6.4 million total links, and around 0.1 million registered users.
Payout Info
- Refer friends and receive 30% of their earnings for life!
- PayPal: Minimum $10 (Not For India)
- Payza: Minimum $20
- Bank Transfer: $20 (India Only)
- PayTm: 10$ USD
- UPI: 10$ USD
- Skrill: 50$ USD
- NETELLER: 30$ USD
- Payoneer: 100$ USD (Available Only for VIP Users)
Ouo.io
Ouo.io is just like the said URL shorteners listed above. But the fantastic thing about Ouo.io is that it supports the Traditional Chinese version. This is so user-friendly for those who speak Chinese.
One more thing about OUO.IO is that the same clickers are counted in the counting of payment.
It is also said that the shortened links per day reach 1.2 million, and the total shortened links reach 0.297 billion. The registered users are 1.1 million users.
The amount of money you earn on OUO depends on your clickers’ countries, while repetitive clicks are also counted in.
You can earn 20% from your affiliate program from every user clicking from your affiliate link. Just like other URL shorteners, the earnings from these URL shorteners vary from country to country. If your audiences click from Australia, then you can get the most amount of 5 dollars per 1000 views.
Payout Info
- Payment Mode : PayPal & Payoneer & Payee
- Minimum Payout: $5
- The Rate of Referral Earning: 20% Commission
- Alexa Rank (Global): 408
- Support Chinese Traditional
Click.sh
The price offered by Clk.sh is up to $20 per 1000 visits, also the minimum CPM rate is $3. Though earning money just by pasting and sharing short links online seems impossible, Clk.sh makes it feasible. Especially if you have an audience from Greenland, Clk.sh can boost your bank accounts. The minimum payment is 5 dollars daily.
If your website viewers and clickers are from Greenland, Iceland, San Marino, then you can get more than 10 USD per 1000 views.
Clk.sh claims that there’s a total of 7,817,578 total clicks, 12,139,408 total links, and more than 30 thousand registered users.
But meanwhile, it also has some restrictions. Visitors have to unique within 24 hours and they have to view your website or contents for more than 10 seconds. For more detailed info, please visit the payout rates page on Clk.sh.
Payout Info
- Minimum Payout: $5
- Payment Frequency: Daily (within 24 hours)
- Payment Methods: PayPal, WebMoney, Payeer, Skrill, UPI and Bank Transfer
- 20% referral income from the promoters from your affiliate link for a lifetime
Za.gl
Za.gl is maybe a new player in the URL shortening industry, and it’s not as famous as the URL shorteners we’ve mentioned above. But this new URL shortener has something very special.
It provides a referral program. Its referral program is a great way to spread the word of its service and to earn even more money with your short links!
Like other URL shorteners, za.gl also has neat administration panel, detailed data and income analysis diagram, and API integration to your website.
The best thing about this platform is that it uses AI for their CPM system to achieve the best payout results for the users.
One best thing about za.gl is that it is totally Captcha free.
If you can refer to your friends and other users online, then you will get 50% of their earnings for life!
If you want to know more about its payout, please visit its publisher rates page.
Payout Info
- We combine all advertising types best payout rates up to $160 / 10000
- Refer friends and receive 50% of their earnings for life!
- Supports PayPal, E-Payza, Skrill, Webmoney, bitcoin, and Bank Transfer
- The minimum threshold of 2 USD for getting paid
Earn4fun.in
Earn up to $25 per 1000 views – it’s the slogan on the official website earn4fun. From the link ending, you will see it is a website from India.
Earn4fun allows users to earn 1 dollar before getting paid. That is also to say, that the minimum threshold of receiving payment from earn4fun is only 1 USD.
It claims that earn4fun has more than 6 billion total clicks, 0.845 billion total links, and more than 1.5 million registered users. For this, you can check the numbers on its official website.
The great thing about the affiliate program is that you can get 25% of earnings for a lifetime if you refer it to your friends. go
As you can see, compared to other platforms’ offer – 10% or 20%, this referral income is slightly higher.
One more thing that needs to be mentioned here is that you can receive the payment from earn4fun within 24 hours if you’ve already achieved your goal.
Payout Info
- Supports PayPal, Paytm, Bank Transfer, and UPI.
- Starting amount of 10$ to 40$ based on different nations.
- Refer friends and receive 25% of their earnings for life.
- The minimum payout for earn4fun is 1$.
- Minimum 5$ for PayPal.
The said 10 URL shorteners are commonly used by online marketers. But there’re more URL shorteners in the world. Some are boosting, and some are declining. You should check them out and pay attention to their dynamic status.
I’ve already visited several URL shorteners mentioned by other bloggers, finding that some URL shorteners have already stopped their services and many a URL shortener has the lower speed to operate.
Thus, you’ve to choose the right one. I’ve also found that many online users raise questions about which URL shortener pays the most amount of money. As to this question, I’d like to say that you have to go for it yourself.
Many blog posts about URL shorteners have been invalid, so you don’t have to take that seriously. If you do want to know more URL shorteners with payments, you can refer to the post-High Paying URL Shortener Websites To Earn Money Online In 2019. But I’m sure that many URL shorteners mentioned in said post have been invalid.
Conclusion
Many a URL shortener does allow users to earn quick money. It is also a good way of passive income. I’d also like to advise you to open several online payment accounts on payment providers to facilitate the process of receiving and earning money online.
If you love this money-making model, you can even integrate your website (if you want to create a website from the very beginning, you can also refer to the post of 8步完成WordPress建站) with a URL shortener WordPress plugin.
But we have to know that the traffic, readers, and visitors are the pivotal elements influencing your income. This means that the content is the most essential factor of this money-making business.
So, why don’t you find a website with big names and users, then you don’t have to worry about the audience anymore? You can use some of the social media platforms to launch your money-making side work via URL shorteners right away.
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