Ep. 012 - Vanity URL and Domain Name Hacks

Hello and welcome, social media practitioners. This is David, here to talk about the best practices in the post-2.0 web. We are currently live on YouTube, on Ustream, on YouNow, on StreamUp, on Periscope, on Meerkat, on Mixlr, and on Blab for the very first time. Thank you all Blab watchers. I see you there, Pastor Hearn. I see you there, Raul. How's it going, Sir Jake Woodward? How's it going, guys? Thanks for tuning in and watching. This is so exciting. For the first time ever, this podcast is going to be a solo episode. I'm going to have a solo episode in this one, which is going to be really great. My preliminary episode 0 was the only other one so far. That has not had a guest. I've had a guest every single time, which has been great. But now, finally, I get to dig deep and unpack some stuff about vanity URLs and domain names, some things that you might not have known before. All right, so I'm gonna skip the feedback portion because I want to get right into the material here for now. And if you guys have any questions, ask them to me as I'm broadcasting, and they'll be available on this podcast for post-production. So please do, if you have a question, just type it in the comments and I will gladly read it out. Thank you so much for watching. So today's topic is about vanity URLs, domain names, and other web address related things. So first off, the first question to ask in case you're not aware is what is a vanity URL? So basically when you make a social network, when you create a social network account, I should say. So I'll use Twitter as an example. You sign up with an email address generally, a name, and a username, and a password of course. And the username, depending on the social network, is very, very important. Not only is it your primary identifier, but it can sometimes be part of your web address for your profile. For example, if your name on Twitter is Joe Blow, not only will people have to use an symbol, @JoeBlow to mention you, but your, but your whole profile is reachable at twitter.com/joeblow. So your username can have multiple uses, and one of those is what's called your vanity URL. Alright, now vanity URLs are very, can be very helpful for a number of reasons. For one, it's easy to say those things out loud. Rather than saying, "Go on Twitter and search for Joe Blow," just say, "Go to twitter.com/joeblow," and there you are. And also, it's part of your brand, too. So if you look up on the address bar and you see like a website dot com slash a bunch of random characters and numbers, that doesn't add to a cohesive brand presence. It dilutes it and it's, and long ugly URLs, that's why bit.ly came out, Bitly, the service. Because originally with Twitter, every character of the URL would count towards your 140-character limit. Now that's changed since, it's about 21, 22 characters. But now Bitly's used to, for a lot of other things other than just shortening URLs. But people don't like long ugly URLs. So having a branded short, Vanity URL can be very, very important for doing stuff on social, right? Another thing though to consider is that applications now are becoming more standard rather than websites. So people will pull out their phones, go to the— open their mobile app and search for your name these days. So you can't always say, "Go to this website/my name," because people are just going to use their mobile apps for the most part. It depends though, some people still use web proper, and it's always good to have a stable presence on the web. So like I mentioned earlier about usernames, so some services when you sign up for them, they'll take your— what you put in for your name field. So let's say I put David Kimball, they'll give me based on the name I put in a username, David Kimball, and then hopefully you can go in and edit it and I'd add the V in the middle like I always do. But different services have different ways of handling how you get your own vanity URL. Sometimes services don't even let you have your own vanity URL. And that's due for a number of reasons. One, it's just not accessible on non-mobile. So the new thing now is lots of social networks are mobile only. Well, obviously there's backend on the web and all that, but I'm saying for consumers and for the users, it's primarily accessible in a mobile app. It's not available on the web browser. So you just, you couldn't have a vanity URL. And then there's some services, for example, I use Vine. That was an example for Vine. It was just a mobile app, but then when they went to web, then they unlocked vanity URLs. So in order to get a vanity URL on Vine, for example, you have to have an account that's 30 days or older, like 30 days old or older. And then I think you have to have like a verified email on the account or something like that. Those are what's required to have your own Vann URL on Vine. So then you have vine.co, 'cause that's their domain, slash your username. So in my case, vine.co/DaveBKimble. Quick reminder to those watching on Meerkat, Periscope, or Blab, comment any question that you have for me. I'll be happy to answer it since I have no guests. Finally, so I'm free to say whatever you guys want me to. So, but then there's another example with, for example, Google+. Google+ was, people complained for years. I think it released around 2011, I believe. And you did, you had a profile URL, but it was literally a bunch of random string of characters and numbers and it was terrible. You couldn't brand it or anything. But then later on Google+ rolled out like vanity profile URLs. And so what that looks like is google.com/+your username, but they're super finicky, and I'll go more into this later on, but they are super finicky about how you get the domain name you want. Because one problem that comes up is brands, like actual, like a Kmart or a Target will make an official account on a social platform, and Joe Blow will have stolen Target for his username. So if brand stuff gets involved, the service will generally take control and they can do what they want with their service. So they might kick someone out of the Target username and to give it to the actual Target brand entity. Little Antennas on Meerkat says he's noticing that I'm wearing my Windows t-shirt on. He's wearing a Meerkat shirt. That's really cool. High five. Virtual high five. So again, like I said, I'll go into that more again later with the Google+ stuff. But technically, Google Profiles, before Google+, before Google Buzz, there was a service called Google Profiles. And that had an interesting vanity URL schema where it was profiles.google.com/your username or google.com/profiles/your username. So technically, if you go to profiles.google.com/DavidVKimble, that also redirects to google.com/+DavidVKimble. So for those few of you that are listening that have a Google Plus, or that had a Google profile back in the day, you can actually, you have several personal branded vanity URLs to get to your Google+ page, which is pretty cool. So hopefully that's something that some of you have. So let's get to the rundown, the social network rundown for vanity URLs. So the first one I'm going to talk about is Facebook. So Facebook rolled out vanity URLs probably about a year or two after I joined, 2010, 2011. 2008, 2009, I don't remember, somewhere around there. And finally they released it as usernames. So you can go to facebook.com/usernames, I believe, and assign your personal profile a custom URL. And that's great because instead of facebook.com/profileID equals bunch of random numbers, you have facebook.com/whatever you'd like. But there's a caveat. You can only change it twice total, and then it's solid. You can't change it at all. And that goes for pages and for personal profiles. And in the rules it says, um, Facebook usernames are not transferable, but I personally have done it several times where I've taken a profile URL and moved it to a page URL and back. But of course, it's still with the limit of you can only change it twice. So you technically can transfer them, it just looks like you change one and then change the other one to what the other one used to be. So I'll use an example. So let's say Joe Blow has facebook.com/joeblow, but then he wants to make a Facebook page. What he has to do is make a page, have it reach 25 likes, 25 likes is the bare minimum that you can change a domain, sorry, a username for a Facebook page. And once he has 25 likes, he changes his own personal profile to Joe Blow or Joe Blow Personal. So now it's facebook.com/joeblowpersonal. And then on his page, he creates facebook.com/joeblow. That's how you can transfer it. It's kind of sketchy and I don't recommend it, but It can be done. Ben, I can't pronounce your last name, on Blab says this is an interesting way to use Blab. I'm very glad you asked that question, or you made that comment rather, because I'm actually on 8 different streaming services simultaneously. I have Meerkat, I have Periscope, I have Ustream, StreamUp, I have all these services going on at the same time. So I can see whenever you guys comment or say something, I can say it, and it's really, it's been a lot of fun so far. Okay, so that's Facebook. Here's another little unknown fact, is if you go to fb.com/username, it redirects to facebook.com/username. So let's say you had fb.com— you said you had facebook.com/joe. You could tell someone, "You can reach my personal Facebook profile by going to fb.com/joe." Super, super short. I love— And really, short URLs or short domain names are coveted because they're becoming so much rarer now and so much more scarce. So if you have anything facebook.com, fb.com, as far as my experience, it redirects the same. And here's the thing about vanity URLs for groups. If you have a group on Facebook, you can assign it a custom URL immediately. And what that looks like is facebook.com/groups/ whatever name you'd like. So for example, I have a Windows 10 group called Windows 10 Hangout. And so I assigned it, immediately after I made it, I assigned it facebook.com/groups/windows10hangout. So if you type that in your address bar, excuse me, you will go directly to that group. So that's Facebook. I don't think I'm missing anything. Oh, there's one more thing too. When you assign a custom name in groups, you get a personal customized email address too assigned to that group. So I think if that address is emailed, then the group members get it or something like that. I don't know all the details there. As far as Twitter goes, you can change your username as often as you like with no penalty, except if you change it to something and then some other account takes your old username, you cannot go back to your old username. So not only do I not recommend changing your Twitter handle, there's really not a good reason to do it unless you now have a really, really good one or you're changing your brand or something. But if you have to, you can really change it whenever you want. And you can totally transfer them. So, um, for example, this is something that Microsoft accounts do a lot. So let's say they're going through an entire rebranding of something. Let's use Windows Phone for example. Microsoft took Windows Phone, the Twitter handle, and they changed the username to Lumia, but as soon as they did that, they made a new Twitter account called Windows Phone so they could catch all the old users that are still @mentioning Windows Phone, which is a very smart thing to do. So if you ever go through a process of rebranding, don't just change your username on Twitter, okay? Have another tab open ready to create a new account with your old username, switch the username on your current profile, and then immediately create a new one with your old username. Because what'll happen is— this happened with my brother's account, for example— his original Twitter username was Donald64, but then he wanted to go through his own personal branding stuff and he used KimballDonald for his personal Twitter handle. Well, almost as soon as he did that, someone else grabbed Donald64, some random person. So luckily he did it relatively early and didn't have a huge following, but if people tried to @mention him at Kimball— or at Donald64, they'd be mentioning someone random and not him. So keep that in mind whenever you do a username change. There's often a lot involved. And another thing is vanity URL. So no one does this, but let's say someone bookmarks twitter.com/Donald64. That's now a completely different profile. So that's something else to keep in mind. Be in control of your usernames because they can have effect on your vanity URL. Instagram, same way. You can change it as often as you like, and technically usernames are transferable. If you change one, you can use that old username on a different one. Same kind of thing with Twitter though. You want to be really, really careful whenever you change your username. Raul has a question. My Twitter username is different from my Facebook and Google+. Is that a bad thing? My Facebook and Google+ is the same. So, excellent question, Raul. It definitely depends. It depends on the brand and it depends on, like, how you've been branding yourself so far. So one thing I would suggest is if it's available, change your Twitter username to your Facebook and Google+ username because consistency is so important in personal branding. And if you haven't marketed your Twitter username too much, you can sometimes get away with it. For example, if you on your business card you put your Twitter handle, well, that's going to be completely useless now. So be mindful of those type things. But if you can, get something personally branded that's somewhat short, I mean, as short as it can be, and, and make sure that it's consistent across everything you can. Now, People would argue if it's a new social network, grab the shortest name you can. So if you're the first one on Beam, for example, grab David, in my case. But here's the thing, there's a lot of social networks out there and there's always gonna be new startups. So my rationale is, yeah, David V. Kimball is more than double, triple the length, not triple, but more than double the length of David. But it's adding to my brand consistency. Yeah, I could go around and be like, "Yeah, my username is David on Beam. That's pretty cool." And it is really cool to have just like one short name as your username. But on the other hand, you do want to build your brand consistency. There's another thing about Twitter is I think you're capped at 15 characters for your username. So if you have anything longer than that, it will not work on Twitter. And that's not too problematic for the most part, but it can be sometimes if someone has a longer than 15-character username. Or whatever. You've been using Twitter since 2007 or 2008, Raul? Excellent. I believe you can still change your username, but again, think about how— think about what accounts that would impact. Another thing, thanks for bringing this up, go to Twitter and go to Settings and go to Applications and look at a list of all the applications that are connected to your Twitter account, and that might help you recall what applications that might affect if you do change your username. For the most part, connected applications are unaffected by a username change. So really it's only if someone bookmarks your, you know, on a browser, you know, which people don't really do anymore so much. It doesn't really affect too much other things, but just be aware of those changes. LinkedIn. So with LinkedIn, you can change your vanity URL, but it's a little bit different and it's very out of the way. You have to go to edit profile and then there's a weird place you click to change it. In fact, it's been so long I don't remember even— they might have changed it. But anyway, it's not LinkedIn.com/your name. It's actually LinkedIn.com/in/your name, which— that brings me to another point of discussion. It's funny because if you do a website.com/profile or a website.com/settings, You expect it to be a website function like accessing your settings or accessing your profile. But what if somebody grabs a username settings or grabs a username profile? A perfect example of this is @reply on Twitter. So he actually wrote the foreword to my book Beyond Tweeting, and he jumped on this opportunity to grab the reply handle on Twitter. On Twitter, and people @mention him all the time by accident, 'cause they talk about @reply. @reply me back, or make sure you @reply me later, or whatever. And he gets mentioned, 'cause that's his username. So what websites are doing now, for example, I wanna say, which one am I thinking of? I know Product Hunt does this. So your username is now producthunt.com/@your username, so that producthunt.com/about can be their about page, and not some username about. Little antennas, have a good night. Thank you for tuning in and watching. So that's one thing that they're doing, and Google did this with Google+. So initially plus.google.com is how you get to Google+, but our vanity URLs can't be google.com/user name because there's already so many other pages like google.com/about. If someone has a username called about, like, that would be weird. So what they do is google.com/+username, and that's a great way to differentiate the two things. And it's so funny, if you go to twitter.com/connect or twitter.com/notifications, it used to have that strange problem where it didn't know whether or not to go to profile or to go to like this actual connect/notifications part of Twitter. Well, now they have twitter.com/i/ Notifications, and that's how you can access your connection, who's tweeted at you and who's listed you or whatever. But that's just kind of funny that websites are realizing, wow, we can't have a, you know,.com/user name because that can cause some problems with our navigation. Oh man, and now we're on to YouTube. Like Google+, YouTube is the biggest pain ever for vanity URLs. It didn't used to be so much. Okay, here's the problem in the old days. If you got a YouTube account— this is before it was acquired by Google— you made a username, and when you made that username, it was youtube.com/that username, and that was your channel URL. You could not change it. You could not transfer it. You couldn't change the case-sensitive letters. You couldn't do anything anything to it, that was it for good. Well, because YouTube's been around for so long and because it has amassed so many users, under Google they had to change a few things. And this is where I shake my head, because if you want to make a YouTube account today, you cannot get youtube.com/yourname. You can't. It's not an option anymore. Their new vanity URL schema is now youtube.com/c/your name. And even getting that is a pain because you have to have something like over 500 subscribers to your channel and you have to have like a verified Google+ page. It's kind of a mess and it's outraged a lot of people. So if you already have a youtube.com/name, keep it. Do not change over to their new system. But I have played around with it a little bit. One of my YouTube channels that has over 500 subscribers has a really old username that I used back in the day. It was like LinkFans something. And for fun, I tried using YouTube's new URL schema. So I took, and I have another gaming profile I use called SmasherDavid. So what I did was, on that YouTube channel, I opted for the new vanity URL option. So I had google.com/+SmasherDavid. On my Google+ page, and youtube.com/c/smasherdavid. And what's funny is that is now my new vanity URL for that channel, but if you also go to youtube.com/linkfan, whatever it was, it also redirects there. So I think if you do get the new /c/name, your old youtube.com/name still redirects to your new /c name. But to be safe, I don't know. I would say don't switch to it yet because it, it like connects it to your Google+ page and then assigns a vanity URL to that too. There's one more really important thing I want to say about Google+ vanity URLs before I talk into a way how you can hack them, which is really cool by the way. I'll explain that in a little bit. But when you When you ask, let's see, Google will email you and say, "You are now eligible for a vanity URL for your YouTube profile," or they might say for your Google+ profile or whatever. At that point, you click the link, "I want my vanity URL," or whatever, and they'll take you to a page and they'll say, "Type in—" Sometimes they'll ask you what you want. Type in what you want and get it. But then they ask for a— I can't think of the word right now— a suffix. They ask you for a suffix. So it can't be your name. It has to be yourname1 or yournamez, or there has to be extra characters. And it's YouTube's way of saying, well, we want to make sure that verified accounts get their username, which I hate. I hate how they do that because it's the same on Google+. Google.com/+/your first name, your last name, and a suffix. So you can't get Joe Blow. You have to get Joe Blow 1, or Joe Blow 23, or Joe Blow XYZ, which is really the dumbest thing ever. So be really careful when you get vanity URL stuff on Google+ or YouTube, not only because it's permanent, you cannot change it ever. It's non-transferable. If you delete that account and try to make a new account, you cannot take your old username back. It is gone forever. So be really careful. So here's a little way that I hacked it to get what I wanted. So like I mentioned, I have another YouTube channel called Smasher David. Well, they were doing that thing where I paired it to my website, the smasherdavid.com website that I had at the time, and I got it approved and it was okay and everything. But when I applied for my vanity URL, it said, "Choose a suffix. It has to be youtube.com/c/smasherdavid suffix." So as if it wasn't bad enough that they threw in the /c in Google— in YouTube domain URLs now for channels, but they wanted me to add a suffix. So at the end of the day, instead of having youtube.com/name, which is how it used to be. Now it's youtube.com/c/name with a suffix, which is absurd. When you look at Twitter and you can get twitter.com/whatever you want, no questions asked. Over here on YouTube, you have to get youtube.com/c/yourthenameyouwant plus a suffix only if you have over 500 subscribers and your account's over 30 days old. It's just ridiculous. In my opinion, usernames should not be that tough to get. And if a celebrity or if an actual brand claims rights to a name that you have and it's legitimate, then that's okay and they should get it in my opinion. But there shouldn't be all these, all these loop, what I'm trying to say, there shouldn't be all these barriers to getting the domain, the vanity URL that you want. It's just absolutely ridiculous that there's all these hurdles in the way. That being said, there are lots of users that create an account, like on Twitter, they pick a username and then they don't touch it for years. So from that standpoint, I understand how frustrating it can be that good usernames, sometimes really short ones like David or Joe or whatever, are wasted on inactive profiles. And I do understand that. So maybe providing a few hurdles is a good idea, but making it this hard, come on Google, that's, that's ridiculous. So to get google.com/+davidvkimble, I had to mess around with Google support and I put V as my nickname. So one of the options for suffix was in between my names. So luckily I was able to throw together davidvkimble like I have on everything else. And that was super lucky. And then of course I made my YouTube account back in the day, so it's youtube.com/davidvkimble. And I'm not getting that new /c crap. I'm not doing that. So all that to say, I talked a lot about YouTube and Google+, but they are really just such a mess, such a mess in the vanity URL department. So with Reddit, your username is so important. In fact, you don't even need an email address to make a Reddit account. That username is so important you cannot change it, you cannot transfer it. So do not try to do either of those things. And now we're gonna talk about Tumblr because Tumblr is a very underutilized weapon, in my opinion, that can be very, very helpful for vanity URLs and domain names. So I'm gonna segue from vanity URLs into domain names. So when you make a Tumblr account, they ask for your email, but one of the first things you do is you set up your own Tumblr profile, which is basically your own blog, and you get a username, and then your username is whatever you picked,.tumblr.com, and that is your blog address. Okay? And also, when you post things in the little Tumblr interface, your username is whatever you picked minus the.tumblr.com. So that is your identity. But what you can do with Tumblr for free is pair it with a domain name that you've purchased. So for example, I purchased davidvkimble.me. I also have davidvkimble.com and I'll go into that later, but since I purchased davidvkimble.me, I pay, what, $12, $10 a year or whatever it is for it, super cheap. I can pair that with Tumblr under the settings and now when you go to davidvkimble.me, it goes to the same place davidvkimble.tumblr.com would go. And what blows my mind about this is That's usually a premium feature. Like most websites or most social networks that even have that feature, if it does at all, charge you. They make you pay for that feature. But with Tumblr, and actually with Blogger and a few others, it's absolutely free. So that's a great thing you can use for your domain name that you purchased. Beyond that, you can set up your own custom redirects. So if you make a new page on Tumblr, which is different than a post, under tumblr.com/customize. That's how you can access those features. Make a new page and make it a redirect. You can do yourdomainname.com or yourdomainname.me or whatever, slash whatever you choose, and it can redirect to whatever you want. So for example, let's say you picked— you made a YouTube account way back in the day and it's not branded at all. It's like trucklover379. And that's, you don't want to say, my name is Jeffrey Mowen, and you can reach me on Twitter @JeffreyMowen, and on Facebook @JeffreyMowen on Facebook, and on Blab, and on Periscope, and my YouTube account is TruckLover379, right? So to prevent that, what you can do is, maybe he, I forgot the name of this guy. I don't even remember, I just said his name, Chuck. Let's say his name is Chuck. Now what you can do is buy chucknelson.com, pair it to Tumblr, and then say, "Oh, you want to go to my YouTube channel? Just go to chucknelson.com/youtube and it will take you to my channel," instead of saying trucklover397. So let me reiterate, because that was a lot of information. Sign up for Tumblr, create an account, then under your blog settings, pair your domain name to it. And I can give you some instructions on how to do that. If you use, you basically are changing your @registries in under your domain name and you're putting in, I think it's 4.4.4, which is Tumblr's IP address, I think. And when you do that, you let, you redirect your domain to Tumblr and then Tumblr assigns it to your blog. So at that point, once you've paired your domain name with your Tumblr account, You can create redirects through pages like whatever you want, like yourname.com/youtube takes you to your YouTube.com whatever page. You can have it so— I'm trying to think of a service that doesn't give you a vanity URL at all. I know there's some of them. Well, let's use Quora for example. So Quora is a great question and answer social network, and they recently got vanity URLs, but they haven't always had it. So let's say it's quora.com/profile/numbersand letters. You can set up a.com/quora to go there. So instead of telling people, "Yeah, to go to my profile, you'll have to just search my name or click in quora.com/profile/whatever," you can say, "Go to mywebsite.com/quora," and it'll take you right there. That's all for free. Tumblr provides that all for free, which is incredible. Can your Tumblr username be changed? Yes, it can. Thanks for asking, Raul. However, With Tumblr usernames, they're extremely hard to find short ones because another really popular service that makes you create a username first thing. So once you find a good one, stick with it. Another thing to keep in mind is, let's say you pair your domain name to Tumblr. So again, I'm gonna use my own personal example. My username is davidvkimble on Tumblr. My website is davidvkimble.me that I pair with Tumblr. But when you make posts, it's still registering under your name, davidvkimble. Davidbkimble.me is just the web part of it. So on the mobile part of it, I'm David B. Kimble. But if I change my name to David Likes Windows, um, davidbkimble.me would stay unchanged, and that would stay the destination for web users. But my username would then come up in the mobile app as, uh, David Kimble Loves Windows, or whatever the name I just came up with. So it has some bearing. On the Tumblr experience, but it doesn't affect your, your domain name. Okay, and so now the next question might be, how do you get your own domain name? How do you get your own.com or.me or.im or whatever the heck you want? Well, you might recognize the name GoDaddy. That's because they— you can buy domains through them. They also provide web hosting and a few other services, email hosting. So what I did, 2012, so about 3 years ago, I purchased davidvkimble.com. And I was in a web development class, not web development, web design class at the time. So that's the name that I purchased because it was the username I was using on all my social networks, right? So then I used, I built my website with Weebly. Now Weebly is for the web, website creators that don't know how to create a website, and that was me then. And I still use Weebly. I actually really like Weebly because on one side, on one end, it's really easy to drag and drop text boxes and images and all that, but there's also a bit of a backend to it. You can upload your own files to it and edit your own theme. You can change the CSS and the HTML, and it has some quirks, but I think it's a great platform. So anyway, I bought davidkimble.com back then. I paired it with Weebly, and I use Weebly for my website, which if you go to davidbkimble.com, you will see it. But I also purchased another domain name, which I mentioned earlier, davidbkimble.me. And I haven't really done much with it other than have it be the home where Tumblr rests. So if you go to davidbkimble.com, you go to my main website. If you go to davidbkimble.me, you go to my Tumblr account. Now, any one of you can do this. You could— and you could argue it might be overkill, to purchase more than one domain name, and it certainly can be. But again, a big reason I purchased another domain name is because with Tumblr, it's just so easy to set up redirects. So for example, if I wanted— let's say I just came out with a new product. I could say, "Yeah, if you want to learn more about it, just go to davidvkimble.com or davidvkimble.me/the-product," and you can go right to it instead of go to producthunt.com/randomurlstring that they assigned to my product. So it's really easy to brand, it's really easy to share, it's really easy to remember to set up redirects. Another thing, if you don't want to use Tumblr at all, and that's fine, and you have different usernames on everything, another really great way to unify your brand is to say, set up subdomains. So for example, in GoDaddy, which is what I use for davidmckimble.com, For example, what I have set up is blog.davidvkimble.com goes to my blog, right? So let's say you're Joe Blow and you have JoeLikesTrucks23 on Twitter, and you have Joe Blow on Facebook, and you have Joe Something Else on Instagram. Instead of remembering all those different usernames and trying to get people to remember them, what you can do is assign twitter.joeblow.com to go to @JoeBlowLikesTrucks on Twitter. And then you set up facebook.joeblow.com to go to facebook.com/joeblow. So you can set up these redirects for free in the service as long as you're paying for the domain you have, which is again, it's like $12, depending on what kind of domain you have, $10 to $12 a year is relatively standard for a.com or a.me. And for that, for paying for that domain, you can set up subdomains to go to your other social networks, which is a really great solution. 'Cause I know for some people they're locked. So on YouTube, like I mentioned before, you can't change your username. On Facebook, maybe you've changed it twice and that's the limit. You can't change it anymore, so you're locked with that username. But you don't want to create a new account and lose all your followers and lose all your subscribers and yada yada yada, all that stuff. So creating subdomains and having them redirected forward to other destinations is actually a very viable alternative to creating a new account or whatever you have to do. That is my little tip for subdomain redirecting. Now, one more thing about Tumblr. One thing that was funny was I purchased Kimball.in. Spelled out, it's Kimballen. That was an accident actually, but I realized it later and I found it kind of funny. So if you go to Kimble.in, you'll come to a really bare-bones website that has a link to my book or link to my podcast or whatever, this podcast. And it's really bare-bones. That's actually a Tumblr backend. And other than paying for Kimble.in, which is whatever, $15, $10 a year, whatever I pay, it's free. And what I've done with Tumblr is I changed the theme, I ripped out the blog part of it. I don't even know, I should probably check the Tumblr terms of use. Use, because maybe this is not even something you're supposed to do. But I just have a really simple page, and then I have kibble.in/book that goes to my Beyond Tweeting book, and then kibble.in/beyondtweeting will go to this podcast, for example. So you can set up these little redirects, and it's really easy to remember. So I can tell someone, "Oh yeah, you want to go to my website? Go to kibble.in/site, and you can go to my website," or whatever I want to do. Then there's one more thing too. If you got your hands on a really, really short domain name, like I'm talking 7 characters total or less, which is considered short now by the way. For example, I'll use myself as an example again. I also purchased dvdv.kim. Now on one hand you could look at this and call myself the most vain person in the world. Although it might sadly be true. Really, that's not why I'm buying all these domain names. Really, my own personal brand is just a placeholder to play around with stuff. And it's not, I'm not costing clients thousands of dollars for making their brand look bad or whatever. So I can use my own personal brand as sort of a guinea pig brand to play around with this stuff. And that's why I have all this stuff about, with my name in it. So I don't want to make it seem like, you know, maybe I am egotistical. But I don't want to make it seem like that. Okay? So I have dvdv.kim. Again, super, super short. And what you can do with something like that is pair it with Bitly. I mentioned Bitly earlier. You can use Bitly to shorten URLs that you share, but also track clicks. So let's say you posted a new article on your blog and you want to tweet it out. If you just tweet out the standard link, unless you look at like the Twitter analytics and find out how many opens your tweet got and stuff. You don't necessarily know how many times that link was clicked. And also, if you share to Facebook, you're like, it's all mucked up and you can't always tell how many clicks you actually got. So if you use Bitly, take that link to your blog post, paste it in Bitly with your Bitly account, it'll redirect, it'll change it to a branded short domain, and you can share that out. The default is just bit.ly/a bunch of random letters that's short. But if you purchase a domain name like dvdv.kim, which I did, for free, you can pair that with your Bitly account. And then whenever you paste a URL that's really long and you want to track it, it'll shorten it. Not only will it shorten it, but it will assign it to your custom branded short URL, and you can track clicks on it. So what you might do is you might post a new article on your blog, copy the URL, open your Bitly account, paste it in there, It'll brand it and shorten it for you and make it trackable. You copy that new URL, paste it on Twitter when you tweet out your new blog post, post it on Facebook when you post out your new Facebook blog post, put it in your Instagram profile, and after a week you can go to Bitly and look at your— the link that you shared, track how many times it's been clicked, find out where the sources are, see who else is sharing that link. And so with Bitly, you have tons of great tools. And without a domain name, it works fine too. You can just create an account and use the default Bitly short URL that they provide, or you can buy your own domain name and make it a branded experience. So for example, if I wanted to share my blog post, it's on davidvkimble.com/blog, but if I want to get the permalink, so it'll be like davidvkimble.com/post/titleofthisblogpost/date or whatever the default string is. Copy that mess, paste it in Bitly, it'll create a dvd.kim/, you know, several numbers or letters that's short. I can copy that URL and blast that, see how many people clicked it, see how many people interacted with it, etc. Mair Monde on Meerkat said, "That was wonderful, man. Thanks for the enlighteners. Love the subdomain idea." You are welcome. I'm glad that you guys are listening and and getting benefit out of this. Okay, so yeah, so that's a really good way to do that. I gotta tell you, it's really, really hard to focus and can be really distracting with like 7 different screens up of 7 different or 8 different services. It's really insane, but hopefully I'm doing an okay job. Alright, so back to Bitly. So that's a huge advantage with Bitly. Also, if you know about IFTTT, which is If This Then That, you can set up rules like every time you post on Instagram, automatically tweet out a link with the native, with the image natively posted. Because if you know, on Twitter, Instagram links don't show up as native images in the platform. So what's nice about IFTTT, if you make an account through that, you can set up a rule so that whenever you post a new Instagram image, tweet the image natively along with the tweet, which is really cool. But you can also connect your bit.ly account to your IFTTT account. So whenever you post a link with IFTTT, bit— your bit.ly short URL, short domain name travels with you. So at the end of the day, you have Tumblr, you have Bitly, you have IFTTT, and whatever service you use to buy the domain name, all connected, all for free except for buying your domain name. You can have a branded experience where you can measure interaction at no cost, which is just unbelievable. So again, to briefly recap, with Tumblr you can— so let's go back to just the bare basics of all what I'm saying. If you wanted to do just the minimum, You buy two domain names. You buy a personal.com or.me and you buy a really, really short domain name that might have some strange ending like.im or.in or.to or whatever you want,.io. And you use the personal branded one, the.com, the.me for your Tumblr personal website. And then you take the other branded really, really short one and pair it with Bitly. And you can do that in GoDaddy, and there's instructions on how to do that. But once you do that— I have an idea. Let's do JoeSchmo.com and Joe.Schmo. Okay? There's no.schmo out there, but let's say that there was. What Joe Schmo can do is he can say, Tumblr is now JoeSchmo.com, and if I write a new book, I can do JoeSchmo.com/book, or if I And that's something that's pretty common. Or if I release a new blog post that I want to name something, I can assign it to joeschmo.com/rantabouttheeconomy or whatever. And that's redirecting to his blog post. In the meantime, you can have joe.schmo, and when he makes that new blog post, it gets tweeted out as, "Here's my new blog post about the economy." and they see a joe.schmo/charactersandnumbers. And that joe.schmo link is tracked, and you can see how many times people clicked it, from what sources, etc., with bit.ly. And then the automation gets powerful when you create rules, like when I post on Instagram using IFTTT.com, create, push out a link from my Bitly account, which of course is joe.schmo whatever, and that happens automatically. And all that paired with Buffer, which is another it's a free service you can use, you can schedule tweets and you can schedule posts. So again, it does, this does seem like a whole lot in the beginning and it's kind of a lot to wrap your mind around, but once you get this down once, it could become an automated process that's completely branded, that you can completely track and you, and it's just, it's so worth it. I can't explain how worth it it is. Meyer Mondy, "Okay, now I need a receipt that will let me manage everything in one platform and that keeps track of passwords too. Advice?" That's an excellent question. Well, there's, there's KeePass. I think KeePass is free for tracking passwords. There's also a lot of paid versions. There's 1Password. There's, I'm blanking on the other one, but I actually don't use those services. I use my own special secret method that I'm not gonna share until I have more grasp on feeling confident I can share how I save my passwords without feeling like I'm compromising some security deal. But as far as the one service for everything, I have to say, if you connect your bit.ly account to Buffer and your IFTTT account to Bitly, you connect, you make all those connections, you do it all appropriately, Buffer is kind of your one-stop shop in some cases because you can post on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And you can schedule tweets for later and put them in a queue, or you can post them immediately. And when you paste a link in Buffer, it'll change it to your branded short Bitly URL automatically if you connect the accounts. And then if you share on Instagram like you would just normally, IFTTT will take care of the rest and post on Twitter and Facebook for you automatically in all the correct short URL ways that you want it to. But you know what, Mairmondi, I'm gonna get back to you on a complete solution, 'cause that's not a complete solution. But in my opinion, it's the closest thing we have so far. And again, there are tools you can purchase that have all those features into one, and you pay top dollar for those. I'm talking thousands of dollars. Honestly, I'm super cheap, and I'm into finding the most inexpensive or the most free ways to do things. That's another thing why I'm doing this podcast, is I'm finding each streaming service, your Meerkats, your Periscopes, your Blabs, that are free to use, and I'm using one page. So SoundCloud is what I'm paying for, that's it, and of course my domain name that I use, beyondtweeting.com. But with Beyond Tweeting and with this podcast, I use SoundCloud, I pay for that. Everything else is free. I'm not paying for anything else, but I'm still getting exposure on a bunch of different platforms to a bunch of different audiences for no cost. And I'm all into that. And so as much as I can share with you guys about the tips and the hacks and things that I've found, I hope they're beneficial to you. So now, unless you guys have any more questions for me, which now is a great time to ask your questions, by the way, it is now time for Ask David V. I ask questions and you answer them, or vice versa sometimes. Like the answer to last episode's question, "What is your live streaming social network of choice and why?" And Vernon E.L. Smith who is the co-host on the other podcast I do called MS Mobile Show. He's actually on episode 1 of Beyond Tweeting. I recommend you listen to it. He cannot get enough of Blab. Blab.im is one of the new streaming services. What's up, Vernon? He got a little shout out, he's responding. So this, what we're using right now, one of the streaming services we're using now is called Blab, for those listening post-production. And it's a great service. I think we mentioned it last episode too with Scott Croucher. Raul is saying Blab is amazing. It totally is. Anyway, and it's quickly becoming one of my favorite video streaming services too. Don't get me wrong, I love Periscope and Meerkat and these other ones that I'm using, but Blab's gotten really big and I'm really excited to see where it goes. It's just so easy and just works so well. So anyway, enough talking about blab on blab. I told them I wouldn't do that for too long. The question of this episode is, do you use a bit.ly account, a Bitly account, and why or how? How do you use it? So to recap, do you use a Bitly account and how do you use it? If you would like to answer that question, you can either throw it in the comments now, or you can tweet me with the hashtag #AskDavidV or post on Instagram with your answer. The social network of the day is Tumblr. Now, I did go quite into depth about Tumblr, but beyond just using it as a slave to redirect to other things, which is only a tiny sliver of what its potential is, Tumblr is an amazing microblogging platform. You can, if you do it right and you know the Tumblr community correctly, you can create viral content relatively easily if you have a good following with images. Images and text are the two things that get the most shares, what I find, but you can also share videos, you can share audio, you can share something in a chat format. I've used Tumblr for a while now. It's just a great platform. I really enjoy it. It has enough customability— customize— wow, I can't talk right now. You can customize it enough to feel like it's yours, but it also is pretty streamlined. It has a good streamlined mobile experience. You can view your feed as a cumulative real-time update of posts, almost like Twitter, really, really very similarly to Twitter. But you also have the freedom to have a web address to share as a normal blog. So that's— I love Tumblr, it's so powerful. It is available on the web at Tumblr.com, and Tumblr is spelled T-U-M-B-L-R dot com, no E. They have an iOS, an Android, and a Windows app. However, there's a really great app for Windows Phone called Ported for Tumblr. It's a better Tumblr app than Tumblr, in my opinion, and I recommend you check that out. It is available in the show notes, there will be links to all of these things. Let's take a trip to the app graveyard. These are the applications and services that are no longer with us. Today's dearly departed application is formspring.me, later known as spring.me. And basically it was an ask me anything, it sort of pioneered the ask me anything type of social network. Anonymously or not anonymously, you could create an account and ask questions to other users on the service. And actually, it got in a lot of trouble and a lot of controversy, as some of these other social networks are too, that are the Ask Me Anything variety. They lead to some really serious stuff like suicides and depression and these terrible things, because when you get direct questions that are anonymous, people can get pretty nasty. And me and Scott touched on this last week about anonymous comments really being nasty and being awful. And so I would say that's the reason why it ended up dying. Actually, they had a scare in 2013. They said, "Oh, we're gonna have to shut down." And through some secret event, they said, "Actually, we're back together. We're now rebranding as Spring.me." And they lasted for another 2 years. But as of August 5th, which was, I don't know, 2 weeks ago or so, spring.me doesn't go anywhere. It seems completely gone by now. But I really liked ForumSpring. I thought it was a neat little social network that had a clean interface, and it was fun to ask questions when people weren't being jerks, which wasn't very often in my experience. And since then, ask.fm and of course Tumblr have adopted the Ask Me Anything component to their social networks. And it's funny that Ask.fm is almost a complete ripoff, complete copy of Formspring, yet is the one still there, still existing. So funny how that works in the startup culture and the social network sphere. Here we go. Now it's time for immature impersonations. Maybe they're good, maybe they're bad, but they are certainly immature. This impersonation is going to be Chris Pirillo. And those of you in the tech world and the YouTube world will know this guy. And, you know what, here's my impersonation of him. Here goes nothing. Ahem. Hello world, I'm Chris Pirillo, and you've tuned into another exciting edition of the Locker Gnome Daily Report, or TL;DR for short, your source not just for the news, but for answers you can use. Like an answer to the question, why hasn't everyone subscribed to David McKimble's podcast yet? Like, honestly, it's a good podcast. But if it's not your thing, that's okay. Because just because I enjoy something doesn't necessarily mean that you'll enjoy it too. I have to say, I've had better days of impersonation. I feel like tomorrow, if I impersonated Chris, it'd be better. This one was off for me. 'Cause I've definitely impersonated him better. But speaking of Chris, VloggerFair is this weekend, or next weekend. In Seattle. So do go to that. You'll be able to meet me if you're a listener and you happen to be in the Seattle area. And you'll be able to meet me— that's like the least exciting part, meeting me. There's gonna be tons of great YouTube celebrities there. There's gonna be lots of vloggers from a variety of platforms. And so it's gonna be a lot of fun. And Chris Pirillo is the guy that runs that. And I actually went to the very first VloggerFair a few years ago. And it was a lot of fun. So I'm excited to go again. This will be my second VloggerFair event. So hopefully I'll see some of you guys there. Wow, this was a fun episode. It was really fun to engage with the viewers and answer you guys' questions. And so that's the struggle right now is when I have guests on, I'm really more focused on the guest and I want to hear what the guest has to say. And I don't know how to share that audio with my Meerkat and Periscope audience yet. I'm working on that. But for now, it was fun to have a really solid solo show with you guys. Thank you so much for watching, for sharing, for downloading, and for subscribing to this podcast. For all things Beyond Tweeting, if you're a first listener or first watcher to the show, you can go to beyondtweeting.com/subscribe. And that's a really easy way to get connected with the show. And you can just search Beyond Tweeting in one of your favorite podcasting applications, we'll pop right up. And if a show's going on right now, which it is, in other words, we're live, you can go to beyondtweeting.com/live and you'll get redirected right to a show that's going on this minute. And so I think it's time Then we end on an anticlimactic line, toes.