Have you ever heard the term: “Vanity URL” and wondered what it is?  Let me explain…

When you run a business, you want to customize variety of things to brand your business. Your logo, your materials, your message, the look of your website and the list goes on.

The URLs (i.e your website links) you use to market your business are the same. No, I’m not just talking about your website domain name that represents you, your business, your message, etc  (like this one is called www.WebsiteCreationWorkshop.com), I’m talking about other websites that support your business.

A Vanity URL is a unique, customized web address that’s easy to remember and relatively short. Here are a couple of examples of how you can use Vanity URLs and why you might want to.

Vanity URLs for Your Social Media Profile Pages

When you sign up for a Facebook page, for example, you’ll automatically get assigned a long URL like this:
https://www.facebook.com/67923647824

Very hard to remember, and not easy to share with others, right? You don’t want to print something like that on your business card, either. 😉

Fortunately, most social media services let you customize your profile page URL that sounds so much better. For example, my Facebook business page Vanity URL is this:
https://www.facebook.com/christinahillsbiz/
(my personal profile is this: https://www.facebook.com/christinahills and you can follow me there too 🙂 )

Advantages of using a Vanity URL for your social media page are:

  • it’s memorable;
  • it’s easy to understand;
  • it can be much shorter than the original URL (making it easier to share and be printed);
  • you can brand it to suit your business, etc;
  • it helps people feel more comfortable clicking on the link;
  • you can strategically choose the words in each URL;

Haven’t gotten your Vanity URLs for the social media platforms you use yet?
The following links to resource pages explain how!  (Note: Each platform has its own rules/restrictions about Vanity URLs, such as how many times you are allowed to change your URL. Please do your due diligence as social media rules change very frequently.)

Vanity URLs When Using Link Shorteners

When you have a long URLs to share, you probably use a “link shortener” such as bit.ly and tinyURL. Did you know most of those services let you customize the last part of the link it gives you?

For example, here is the shortened link for my site that bit.ly gave me:
http://bit.ly/2EUHO7u

But I was able to customize it to:
http://bit.ly/create-wordpress-site

Both links go to the same site, but doesn’t the second one look so much better?

Using a Vanity URLs for a shortened link has all the advantages explained above, too. Also, according to bit.ly, “Branded & customized links get 34% more clicks.“

Here is a related article I wrote on grabbing your vanity URL with a custom PayPal.me page

So… if you haven’t taken advantage of Vanity URLs, and gone ahead and claimed yours, then what are you waiting for?

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