Split Testing Craigslist

Flickr photo by acloudman I’m seeing a lot of uses for linktrack lately, and one of the most common is tracking Craigslist ads.

If you’ve never been to Craigslist, it’s essentially an online classified ads utility like you would see in a newspaper. The site has generated enough traffic that it’s a very viable place to buy, sell and trade products and services.

It’s so effective that some businesses have taken to posting on a daily basis to attract new business. Linktrack is a great resource for them because it gives them the opportunity to gauge the effectiveness of their ads for either split testing or as a general tracking resource.

Track Affiliate URLs

If you’re involved in an affiliate campaign that provides a special tracking URL so you can collect commissions, then LinkTrack is definitely a good fit for you.

Not only can you disguise your affiliate links (so your users don’t know you’re an affiliate) but you can also independently track your traffic statistics and compare them to your affiliate statistics.

Bulk Email Campaign Tracking

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.

Sample Email Signature

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.

How to Shorten Long Links

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.

Email Tracking

I’ve been experimenting with LinkTrack as a way to track when an email message has been opened. Essentially, if you use LinkTrack to create a tracking link to an image (like this), and then embed that image in an email, you can know when that email has been opened on the other end! Pretty cool.

This is essentially the same trick that bulk email services like Constant Contact, iContact, Aweber, etc. use in their software.

This is kind of usage probably isn’t for beginners, but it is a neat trick if you’re comfortable using it.

New Blog

We’ve added a new blog to the web site! We’ll use it to let you know about the latest updates, news and happenings with the LinkTrack web site.

Brace yourself.