From a marketing perspective, social media is becoming really hard to ignore. It’s everywhere – from storing your resume on LinkedIn to keeping up with friends on Facebook and Google+, to sharing updates, video and pictures on sites like YouTube, Twitter and Flickr.

All of these are great but there’s so many that it’s difficult to keep up with all of them. How are you supposed to know where your best results are coming from?

That’s why we built Linktrack. We give you a simple tool to monitor and measure results in real time across a wide variety of sites. You can quickly see where your traffic is coming from so you can better tailor your marketing.

Try it now with these steps:

1. Sign up for an account here
2. Make a tracking link to measure what you’re interested in (bringing visitors to your web site for example).
3. Post it on your Facebook page, Google+ page, in your Twitter stream, in your YouTube descriptions, etc.
4. Watch the traffic come in over a few hours or days and you’ll start to get a feel for which sites are doing the most for you!

Want to take it a step further? Try out a month of one of our premium accounts for only $1 and try one of these options:

• Add email alerts to get an email alert every time your link gets a click.
• Turn on conversion tracking to track sales or conversions from your link.
• Setup your own custom domain for branded tracking links.

Let’s say you want to use LinkTrack to gauge traffic to particular web pages on your web site. Here’s what you do:

1. Pick an image on your web site like this one: this one
2. Make a LinkTrack link directly to that image like this: http://linktrack.info/36nq0en
3. Use the tracking link in your image html like this:<img src="http://linktrack.info/36nq0en">and place it on your web page.

Every time your page is loaded, it will register on your tracking page! It’s no substitute for your server log files, but you can use it to track one specific web page rather than the site as a whole, or use it on sites where you wouldn’t have access to the log files.

If you were to use a smaller image like a transparent .gif or something that’s 1 pixel wide by 1 pixel tall, you would still get the tracking benefit, but the image wouldn’t even be noticeable.

Here’s my tracking picture in action:

See the tracking results at http://linktrack.info/track/36nq0en

Neat, huh?

Email campaign tracking is pretty important. If you’re paying top dollar and investing your own time and effort into gathering an email list, writing good sales copy, and ensuring deliverability, then you want to get as much for your effort as possible.

If you’re just linking back to your site using regular URLs, consider using LinkTrack URLs instead. That way you can get an idea of what your readers are most interested in and how they’re reacting to your messages.

Once you know that, you can tailor your campaign better achieve your goals.

I’ve seen people using LinkTrack in their email signatures, and it’s a pretty cool idea. Here’s a sample email signature that I use:

Full name
Company Name
999-999-9999
name@domain.com
http://mycompany.com

Note that if you click the mycompany.com link, it’s actually a LinkTrack link. That way you can get an idea of how many people are interested enough in what you do to check out your web site.

The biggest use people have for LinkTrack is as a link shortening service. If you take a long link like:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&
q=124+Grapevine+Hwy,+Hurst,+TX+76054
&sll=37.0625,-5.677068&sspn=49.978077,92.8125&ie=
UTF8&ll=32.871721,-97.16844&spn=0.0065
24,0.01133&z=17&layer=c&cbll=32.870212,-97.168443

You can shorten it so it looks like this:

http://linktrack.info/p00wwqj

As an added bonus, you can track how often that link has been clicked on. Each page gets its own tracking page like this one.

I used this the other day when I was meeting with a client. After I sent him directions, I was able to follow up on the tracking page to see that they had accessed them.