Today’s guest poster, Jamie from Totally The Bomb uses linktrack daily, so we asked her to tell us why she’s chosen us as her link tracking service.

Thanks Linktrack! I’m happy to be here. Let me just start by saying that without linktrack, I wouldn’t have a clue that social networking even actually worked for me.

For example, I hosted a give away on my blog today. I made four links going to the same place, but I uploaded them in different places. I put one on my twitter feed, one on my facebook, one on contest websites, and one in a mass email I sent out to my subscribers.

I checked on my links right now, and I just discovered that my link on twitter got 250 clicks, the one I did on the contest website only got 16. So, what have I learned from this? Dude, don’t waste my time with that contest website anymore.

Which means that Linktrack just saved me a serious amount of time.

Now, I know that there are people out there who do this social media thing as a business. I just think it’d be really nice to show the linktrack page to your boss and say, “LOOK! That stupid contest website you have me posting to isn’t actually working! Can we try something else?”

Let’s face it, in this whole crazy technological day and age, it’s all about the data, and that’s what linktrack gives us. Real time data about who is clicking our links and where they’re clicking in from. Without it, I wouldn’t have a clue if that stuff was working or not.

Thanks Linktrack, I promise to always use you for all my link tracking needs! You guys Rock!

One important benefit of using a full-control link tracking service like LinkTrack is the ability to re-target your links anytime you want with just a few clicks.  Here are some examples where you might want to re-target a link:

• You’re an affiliate marketer and your parent affiliate updates their tracking software and issues new affiliate links to you.  Rather than go around and beg hundreds of web site owners to update your link, just re-target the destination in your LinkTrack account.
• Likewise, if you decide to drop an affiliate provider – why let all your previous marketing effort go to waste?
• If you’re in to social networking you probably have a profile page with Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, etc.  Rather than listing your home page in your profile, try using a LinkTrack link.  Not only can you see which profile is generating the most interest, but if you move web sites you can re-target them all in one place.
• Lastly, let’s say you’re tracking traffic to a particular product on your ecommerce site and decide to stop carrying that product.  Rather than show your visitors an error page, just update your tracking link to point to your homepage, or better yet, to a similar product.

Just a few example off the top of my head.  If you have any suggestions for how to make use of re-targeted links, let us know.

If your’e a regular LinkTrack user you probably noticed that we installed a new account system over the weekend.  This came mostly from the billion or so requests we received to make our link creation/link tracking system more user friendly and easier to organize.  There were also a few requests from the owners that we also do something to cover the expenses we’re racking up.

The solution was simple – we instituted a user account system where you can make links, track them, and keep them organized under an account name.  Same as always, but this way the links are tied to an account so you have more control over them and can make changes if you want.

We also added a few ‘premium’ features and gave people the option to upgrade their accounts.  Premium features are things like password protection on your  links, email alerts, set your links to expire at a certain time or not at all, turn them on and off, download account data, etc.

Lastly, we re-organized some of the data to make things easier to read, added some flashy graphs and tried to improve the look and feel without making it too cumbersome.

The result is something that we’re pretty proud of.  We’ve got a nice free system for people to use with some features that aren’t offered anywhere else and our users are already taking advantage of the paid service.  I asked a few of them and got a 50/50 mix of those who just want to support the service, and those who want to use the features which I think is awesome.

Please feel free to check out the new site.  If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please drop us a line anytime.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.