Su.pr URL shortener is one of the best shorteners ever. Previously I’ve been writing about the URL shortener NXY.IN, and I thought that the “ad” opportunity of this service makes it the best one. I was partly wrong.

Why partly?

Because the main aim of shortening your URLs is to get traffic getting more out of your tweets and profile statuses with limited characters number. NXY does a good shortening job.. but.. its name is not that attractive and popular, its frame looks not that elegant..

Anyways, let’s talk about the Su.pr URL shortener.

8 Reasons to Shorten Your URLs Using Su.pr

1. 19 characters – All of your shortened links will be 19 characters long;
2. Post messages – You can post links (messages) not only on Twitter, but on Facebook as well and optionally at the same time;
3. Schedule them – You can schedule for later your tweets and facebook status updates;
4. 301 redirect – Su.pr URL shortening service has auto 301 redirect, which makes your links SEO friendly;
5. New post notifyer – Remember the Feedburner’s new “socialize” feature? Su.pr has the same;
6. Tracking statistics – Su.pr URL shortener tracks your links, counting unique clicks, retweets of the shortened link, number of reviews and stumbles;
7. Suggested posting time – This link shortener is one step further, than other similar services. It even suggests you the ideal posting time, based on the made clicks stats;
8. Friendly frame – The final reason is the friendly StumbleUpon frame, which motivates you to press “I like this” button. Of course! It’s only one click away :) ;

When to Use Su.pr?

My suggestion is to use this service to promote your own links. Just like I do.

What about other links?

Well.. I used to shorten them with NXY, because it adds some personal profit to sharing. I mean the AdSense or your own blog or website banner feature.

Minuses of Su.pr URL Shortener

It really took me some time to come up with the possible minuses of this service. Yeap.. this is so good, that you should think a little to come up with its minuses. I’ve found just 2 of them:

• Su.pr URLs are not the shortest. There are services, that offer 14-15 characters;
• There are no “tops” of links, that are usually your potential extra traffic;
• Plus 1 (21st Jan): Ileane said about the frame “problem”. Well, this post is the actual evidence of it. You can see that it has 1 retweet – that’s mine. But there are 10+ retweets more of su.pr link of this post that I tweeted;

Anyways, Su.pr is my number 1 URL shortener now. I just fell in love with it :) My number 2 is still NXY.

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What is URL Shortener?

URL shortening services are created for such social networks like Twitter. All we know, that Twitter allows us to use only 140 characters per one message. So this is very good idea to shorten our huge post links like the one I have for this post – http://www.iwoodpecker.com/url-shortener-nxy-that-earns-money-and-gets-web-traffic .

Which URL shortener is the best?

It’s easy to guess, that the best url shortener is the one, that makes the shortest URL out of your natural URL. Well, I wanted to make a list of those shorteners to choose from, but there is already some nice compilation at Wikipedia.

Why NXY.IN is so special?

First of all, NXY.IN is comparatively short itself. And it does a good shortening job as well. But it’s not the only one reason, why I’m talking about it now. NXY.IN has also the opportunity to make money for you and to drive traffic to your website.

How Does It Make Money?

It’s easy. Login to NXY with your Twitter account > go to the top option “Ads Settings” > paste your AdSense publisher ID and the ID of your channel. In order to display some special ad, you should make another ad code in your AdSense account or you can use your old one, if you’ve had some, which is not bigger, than 468×60 px. Check out the pic how your option should look like.

If you don’t want to use AdSense, you can make your own banner – 468×60 is the max size for NXY. It will appear in the top left corner. Tip: it makes sense, when you shorten others sites’ URLs. You can, actually, use your blog’s banner with NXY. So.. it lets you to promote others without forgetting of yourself :)

Moreover, there’s a distribution Twitter button in the top right corner of the shortened URL and the option to cancel that bar. So, if a user doesn’t want to see your ad or this bar at all – he can turn it off. Let me show you all those features…

How does it get web traffic?

It doesn’t get traffic directly by your wish, but it does get traffic, if your shortened links become popular. If they are popular, and you did everything you could to show those links, you can get to the section of “Top Articles” or “Today’s Hot”, which supposed to bring you some extra traffic.

First of all, track your links stats:

If you did well, then you might get to the right tab of your account, which is, actually, more like a “social activity top”. It looks like this:

I’d say, that it’s hard to make your links viewed on Twitter, unless you have more, than 2,000/3,000 followers (I’m not speaking about targeted followers). The best way is to use NXY URL shortener beyond Twitter: profiles, forums, social media sites, in comments, on your website etc.

Minuses of NXY.IN

1. Ads in shortened links. You might lose some piece of your audience, if there are those, who don’t like ads;

2. My own experience – I have a total of 300+ views. And there are still no clicks on ads. Why did I mention this fact here? Because of AdSense. I think it’s not that attractive to earn money from it. But I might be wrong and it’s all about your viewers and the number of views :) ;

3. It’s not that easy to get traffic. You have to work on your total number of views.

Updated on the 13th Jan. 2010

NXY have changed their design, but the principles are the same. You can get money, you can get traffic with this service.. blah blah blah :)

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