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Some urls have been changed to protect the innocent...
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A heads up here on the serious advantages of using bit.ly.
You've probably seen urls like this http://bit.ly/7xAhP2 all over the internet, and may have wondered what they're about.
The main thing bit.ly does is shorten your url. This is a great boon for posting to sites that always seem to screw up long URLs, and tinyurl.com was the first service like this to become popular.
But Bit.ly goes much further. For starters it keeps a log of everyone who uses that url, and will give you very useful stats on when that url was clicked, from what part of the world, and via what the referrer. For free!
But there's more. If you create a Bit.ly url they first check to see if anyone else has shortened that same one and they combine the stats. In itself this can be useful. But if you want to keep track only of your own referrals you can add a bit of simple code which will create a unique bit.ly url, which then gets it's own tracking data.
For instance if you follow http://bit.ly/7xAhP2 - which is a video I've been experimenting with - you'll see I've appended &WebDesignForum13Jan2010 to the url. Next time I go to http://bit.ly I can now see how many people went to my video directly from this link here, when you did, and even where in the world you are!
What you need to do (and you can do this to virtually any url you want to shrink and track) is add '&' and then alphanumeric characters. Browsers will disregard these, but bit.ly will treat the whole url as unique.
Ironically, what I've found to be most useful about this is discovering which of my links are LEAST visited, which tells me where I'm completely wasting my time! For instance, a concerted Twitter campaign has only yielded about 5% of my hits. So next time I'll concentrate my efforts elsewhere. Twitter is well overrated.
Hmm... So are you thinking what I'm thinking? If only you could do the same with your life? Or would it be too depressing to find out how much of that was a waste of time!
p.s. Make sure your modified link actually works before posting it anywhere!
What do you think?
Any related tips? 
p.s. Are there any alphanumeric sequences to be avoided?
