Guest Blogger Brian O'Connell Shares His "Bundle" Secret for Connecting All Your Site URLs

Here is a very important guest post from Internet and software consultant Brian O'Connell, who can be followed at http://twitter.com/Brian_OConnell. He also blogs at http://outsidethedodgers.wordpress.com/

Having a single web site is no longer adequate to support the marketing effort for your brand. With the proliferation of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and others, it is now necessary to maintain a presence on many of these sites.

Managing multiple sites can be time consuming, and it is a challenge to remember all of places that you may have set up for yourself or your client.

In addition, the 140 character limit for a Tweet leaves little room for multiple marketing links.

I have been using bit.ly along with its browser toolbar button to instantly shorten long URL links. Many other URL shortener sites can also do the same, in fact, Twitter has its own built-in link shortener.

The real power of using bit.ly is the ability to bundle many Internet links together into a single, short URL which can be sent to a prospective customer, or used just to keep all of your links in one place. The bundles can be set for public or private use.

As an example, Rick Moses, the actor who once played "Hutch" (the hit man who was sent to kill Luke and Laura on the daytime soap "General Hospital" and had the title role on the CBS dramatic series "Young Dan'l Boone"), asked me to help him with a website.

He is also a singer/songwriter and had just finished recording a CD, "Evil and Dangerous Men," and wanted to sell it online. I set up a simple website using tools from Yahoo Small Business.

As time went by, we started adding other sites: YouTube for some music videos and clips from his old TV and movie appearances, a Wikipedia article, Facebook, Twitter and the Jango Internet Radio station with all of his songs. Finally, we got his music on iTunes and Amazon. Each new link was documented via email.

This all happened over a period of many months, with no activity in between. Then I would get a call with a new marketing idea, and I would have to scramble to track down all of the links to his Internet presence. I needed a better way to keep track and discovered the bundling capability of bit.ly. Now, I can just add new links as they come along.

The link I created for myself and Rick is http://bit.ly/m3Dtno and I created other bundles for Rick that he can use for his targeted marketing goals. For people that may be interested in his spiritual side, he can send them this link: http://bit.ly/kuaBdD

I met this blog's creator and owner, Phyllis Zimbler Miller, a few days ago when I saw her Twitter link in the front of her ebook technothriller, LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS, which I had just finished. I decided to tweet how much I enjoyed reading it.

We exchanged a couple more Tweets and as a result of my compliments, she was inspired to create a blog post about the power of using Twitter for authors.

Being an expert online marketer, Phyllis included links to her various activities in her blog pages. Being a curious person, I naturally clicked on her links, read her pages, then found even more links.

I decided to create a bundle instead of bookmarking all of her links. I now can easily return to any one of her links simply by going to https://bit.ly/yPd0Av

Another great reason to use bit.ly is the excellent tracking information it keeps. You can try various marketing campaigns by creating different bit.ly links to the same website. You can see the results by adding a "+" to the end of your bit.ly link, or clicking on the Info Page+ link next to each bit.ly link on the bundle page.

An example from a link to the Rick Moses website shows a wealth of tracking data. It can be seen at https://bit.ly/lNduWe+

Help getting started with bit.ly can be found at http://bit.ly/yGW6Cz, a bundle of three bit.ly sites.

Note from Phyllis: Brian's use of bit.ly for targeted marketing purposes is brilliant — and I thank him for sharing his expertise here and I hope my blog readers benefit from emulating his advice.