The Power of Shortlinks | Coaching Corner #004

Foreign.

What's going on, everybody?

How are you doing?

Welcome back to a coaching corner with David and Tyson here. Very excited to have you back for another round of some awesome expert tips and tricks, some of the best practices on common questions and, you know, best practice, best things to do inside your ClickFunnels account. Today we're gonna be covering something that will save you some loads of time and headache and confusion all around, all revolving around one simple concept.

Okay?

And it's clickfunnels take on redirect links called short links. All right? It's awesome. And whenever you get good at it, whenever you start to add this into your. Your repertoire of things that you normally do, it'll save you loads of time, loads of headache. And we're happy to share this with you because it'll. It'll really help you out in your business journey.

Okay? Take our suffering for yourself and we just want to see you run with it, honestly. Hours of time, guys, we're talking hours of editing. If only we knew about this earlier.

Exactly. There are two really good ways to learn things in life, either by other people's mistakes or by your own mistakes. You can learn it faster by learning it through other other's mistakes, our mistakes and you know, but sometimes we got to learn things on our own, obviously. But take it from us, let's just help speed things up for you here.

Okay, let's do it.

So, Tyson, why don't you go ahead.

And take it away. I'm getting a little bit of feedback on your end. I think your speakers are up just so if in case I'm not the only one. All right, so today we're diving into Shorelinks and let me just share my screen here so we can all walk through it together. First and foremost, let's just kind of walk through what shortly is. It's a app inside of ClickFunnels 2.0 that allows you to create redirects to basically, well, anywhere you want to go. I mean, your. Your world, you're. We're just living in it, right? And you can set up any link that you need, any redirect that you need for anything. Hopefully I wasn't unclear. Basically, if you've ever use say like Bitly, right? That's prime example. People use Bitly for social media posts or a lot of different things as a link shortener tool. And it's okay, you know, it does the job. But where's the branding? You don't get to see there's no personal domain, no personal URL and short links kind of solves that. It's all directly inside the platform. We're gonna walk through a couple examples of how to actually use it where you can implement this in what you currently already have set up. And if maybe you have any other suggestions or anything else that pops in your head while we do it, let us know and maybe we can walk through that as well.

But yes, by the way, can we have you zoom up on that just a little bit?

Oh, my gosh. You know what? We did this last week. You're totally right. There we go.

Beautiful.

I'll do one more for theatrics. There we go. Is that better? That's easier to read. Perfect. Okay, continue. All right, so we're gonna walk through a couple examples of where this will come into play. One that I've seen personally is going to be like QR codes. People send out physical mailers with a QR code on it, or maybe they have like a. I don't know, they put on like their work truck or something. And not everyone pays for their QR codes. Maybe you have like a free QR code generator. And so it's a lot harder to change the link once you've already created the code and it's out there in the world and people are scanning it and maybe like the web page goes down or like a link changes. What we're going to walk through here is going to make it a lot easier to fix that problem without having to think about it twice. So let's walk through this one step at a time. First off, we need to grab the actual short links app inside of the workspace. And to do that, just head over here to the left hand navigation in your screen. Here you're in clickfunnels and click on Add Apps. Once you do, should bring you to the app center just like so. And we just wanna scroll down until we see the option for shorlinks. Now I already have it added, that's why it's at the bottom of the page. But otherwise you would probably see it closer to the top here. Either way, click on it directly. And this is gonna be very similar to what you're gonna see on your side, except there should be a little button that says Add App and once you do, it will allow you to start creating the actual app itself or your first redirect. Let me show you exactly what you'll see after you click that Add App button. It's going to be this little pop up basically, or this page here where you can start Filling out your short link details, starting with a name, right? Let's give it a name, shall we? We're talking about QR codes. Let's call this cool QR code, maybe capitalize that first one. And the cool thing I mentioned before, right, is that you can use your own custom domain. You can use, well, obviously your clickfunnels subdomain if you wanted to, but probably you want to take branding into consideration and use something like your actual domain, right? So I could technically click on this. And now we're creating a new URL, new short link or redirect for this domain right here. That's what people are actually going to see. Below that we can go in and customize the path itself. Right? As of right now, it just takes the name that we created right here at the top, which is cool QR code. And if we want to add number two, right, that's totally fine, put whatever you want. But the goal is obviously we're trying to make beautiful easy to use URLs. And that's basically it. So we're leave that as is. And as we scroll down, one of the more important parts here is going to be the target URL. This is going to be where you're going to send people when they type in this domain right here. So your domain with this path name. I'll show you an easier way to grab that URL in a second. But if I want to go to say, google.com actually I can just copy and paste right here. That's it. That's all we have to do technically at this point, we can just save. And now the redirect is live and that is it. But there's other things here that we can go and adjust. Let David kind of break that down in a moment. Yeah, let's just go and create this. I can show you where to grab the actual link now that we have it created. Every time you create a new short link, it's going to show it as an option here under the short links app. You just have to look for that name we created and there will be an ability to. Or you have the option to just copy the link that you created, which is right here. This guy right here. If you click on it directly, it'll copy to your clipboard. And now you can use it, you can share it, you can give it out, use it for a QR code. Right. If you need to adjust it at any point again, maybe like a link changes and like your business page changes, the location where people would go Changes. You can always come back here to this short code or short link, go to the settings and change the target URL. And it's as simple as that. Same location. People are still going to the same spot, but you can change the place that it redirects you to. That's it. My. Am I speaking clear enough? David, what do you think? Is that pretty cool or what? I mean, so simple. You do that in two minutes, you don't have to worry about any random crazy redirects going to wrong places, which is lovely.

And what I love is that it's all in house inside of clickfunnels. You don't have to go and use 14 different redirect tools. Like. Like it's possible out there.

So, like, I'm glad that this is. It's something directly in there. And you can use your own custom domain. I can't stress that enough. Any domain.

Yeah.

Which is great.

Yeah. Making it nice and pretty with your own custom main is very important.

What were you gonna say? You're gonna break something up while we're on that page? You want me go back into the editor there?

Yeah. We're going to cover a lot of different use cases here. And let's see, let's just go down the list. Links can be printed physically. Affiliate links, call links.

Oh, you're referring to this down here. I'm so sorry.

Asset downloads. Yes.

Okay.

Call links. So here's actually a good use case for the call links. Let's go ahead. Tyson, can you direct us go to the appointments. Do we have that Appointments one on.

This workspace back over here shortly. Oh, Appointments, the Appointments app.

Yeah. No, it doesn't.

Look, we don't have it added in this specific workspace. But the main thought behind the call links, for me, the reason why I put that there is because Zoom links. Right. Let's say you have. You're running like a frequent call once a week or something, and maybe you'd like to change up the actual Zoom link without having to change the location. People can go to an example of that. If I go and add a new short link, we'll call this Weekly Zoom Link. And probably going to change the URL to be Weekly Call is probably fine, actually. Weekly Call, Right. Change it to Domain. And now instead of going and updating every single location that you had or shared that Zoom link, you can just come here and change the actual call link that you want people to be redirected to in this field right here. That's it. It's just a One click replacement, essentially. So we'll type in Zoom call or Zoom.com call. Oh, my goodness. What? I just type in there. That was crazy. Zoom.com forward/awesome. I don't know. Yeah, forward slash awesome. I love that. And this is the URL that you give people now, this one up here. This guy right here. Right. So we have the forward slash weekly call, and that never changes. So you can give that out week after week. And when it comes time to updating the actual URL that you want people to be brought to, you just come back to the, the short links app. Go to that specific link itself that you created. Click on the gear icon here, and then from there, just change up this guy right here. That's it. That's all you have to do. And now people are still being brought to the right location without you having to worry about it. There we go. That's what I meant by the call link right here. Nothing. I mean, you could do it with anything. But for example, I had to at one point go through and update probably 37 emails with one specific call link almost for every other week. And oh, my goodness, it was doable, but it was annoying. And so this would have solved that without too much headache. Like when I say save time, I mean, probably like an hour or so going through those emails to just go make it a working thing.

Yeah, Just. Just paste this short link into the email itself. And then you don't have to go and update the. The link on every single email. You can just update the link in the short link.

Right?

Exactly the target.

Yeah, absolutely.

So let's look at another example. How about the asset downloads?

Sure.

That's really. That's really good. So who out there is delivering some free lead magnets? Almost all of us right now. Whenever you do that, Tyson, can you go ahead and go to the. The assets area?

Sure.

Okay, so whenever we, Whenever we upload a downloadable PDF, that creates a link. Right. And you can deliver that link in an email and, you know, among other ways. But if you find that you need to make a change on that digital download, if you go into the assets here, there is an option to change the. The upload. So you can like delete. You can delete the previous PDF and you can re upload a different one, but it creates a new link. And so you don't want to have to again go to all those emails and change the link wherever it is that you posted it. It would be nice if you just had one link that was out there that didn't change and you just changed the target.

Right.

So that is another use case that I found to be very helpful.

Right, so we have our download here ready to go. But when I actually grab this, we just click on it directly and we'll go ahead and click on the little copy icon next to the garbage can there. And it should just copy that link to this specific downloadable URL or asset rather, that we can then go back and use instead of short links. So let me back out of here. Scroll down a little bit. Oh, short links. There we go. I'm just blind. Don't mind me. These glasses are just for vanity. All right, so from here, if we wanted to create like a special link for this download. Right. Same process, we're gonna go up to the top, right. Click on new short link and we can go in, give this guy a name. What do you want to call it? David? You have any special, special names in your mind?

Free guide download.

Free guide download. There we go. And you can leave the path name just like that if you want to. I'm gonna change this to different domain there. I'm gonna go down to just free download. Right. Pretty straightforward. And from here we'll change the URL to the thing that we have copied, which is that downloadable asset. That's it.

And this is a great example of where it takes a really long link and shortens it down to be nice and pretty.

Yeah. So instead of worrying about this whole crazy long target URL there, all you have to worry about is going to be this guy right here. All you have to worry about is this one right here. That's it. Look at the comparable difference. You can see the actual target URL on the right hand side and then the short link that we created on the left hand side there. How, how lovely is that?

It also gives you the number of times it's been clicked on and it can also be used for split testing. So let's go ahead and dive into one of those again.

Split test. Do you have a preferable one you want me to click on here?

No, just any of them.

Okay. Look how long that is. Yeah.

We'Ve got to add this to our list here. But if you scroll down a little bit, there is split testing right there. You can add a second URL and then you can add a split percentage and you can also add any retargeting pixels right there.

Yep.

How cool is that?

I mean, super cool. How much easier does it get? Right. The split testing option there as well, by the way, is really nice if you're trying to split test different funnels entirely. Like if you have funnel A versus funnel B and they both have their own split test or. Yeah, split test running for the first step inside the funnel. A cool thing that I've used here or done in the past is basically take the funnel URL for each funnel and we are split testing between the two so we can see which funnel does better overall and then we can run from there moving forward. So, so say funnel a, it's like 20 more conversions. We have our answer and that's it. I don't know. The way you test it though is you'd put funnel A up here, for instance, in the target URL. And then for funnel B you just come down here to split testing paste in that URL. Let's do funnel B. Obviously this is not a real URL, but. And then change the percentage to be what you want to be between how many times people go to one versus the other. In this case we're doing a 50, 50 split and that's it. Just like that. You have a split test running. You can see what's actually working, where people are going and what converts better. Yeah, yeah. Super fun. That's a fun one. Do you have any other use cases for that one? Any other split tests you run using this? No.

No, no.

Okay, well, there we go. Try this one out. Maybe you'll love it, maybe you won't. I, I don't know. I loved it. It made it a lot easier.

Another good example is tracking. So it's always really helpful to know where your traffic is coming from. And you can use your short links here and add in the UTM tracking parameters to find out exactly where they are coming from. Now whenever they click on the link, it's going to add in these little parameters to the back ends of the target URL. Then whenever they opt in, it's going to save that information in their contacts custom attributes. Therefore you'll actually be able to see where they came from. There's also an analytics filter in the funnel analytics so you can see where they entered from and then what was their last page? If you ever have any different changes in the UTM parameters. Cool. Okay, Some examples of this. I use one from link tree.

Okay.

So I've got a, I've got, I made a very simple landing page. It's a, it simulates link tree and it's on most of my social medias and I've got, I use one of these short links on pretty much every one of the buttons there. And then you just put link tree in one of those UTM parameters and then I can find out exactly where they came from.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

Because otherwise sometimes it's really like you don't want to.

Yeah.

The link tree page is the in between page. It's the, the, the, you know, the, the light funnel hub that gets them from your social medias to all of your different things. And without that kind of a tracking, you just don't know exactly where they're finding your stuff.

Right. That's a good idea. You know, I've been doing the manual way of just tagging. People have a different funnel per one, but this is a lot cleaner. Yeah. What am I thinking? Dang. What are you. Oh my gosh. Yep.

Let's make it easy, right?

Make it easy. Okay. Yeah.

Another good way to do it is from. Is from Facebook. So let's talk about ad platforms next and then we can talk about the links in your, in your bio over on Facebook. And if you're running like any kind of a special promotion, this is a good example for right now. Black Friday sales. I've got a special short link on my Facebook that's going to a Black Friday sale and I created a short link there and I added FB at the end. That's letting me know that it's from Facebook.

Okay.

It can be whatever you want. I just decided to make it like that.

Okay.

Doesn't really matter. People are still going to click on it. And, and that is specifically telling me like I've got in the UTM parameters that they're coming from Facebook and then the.

Let me.

Well, I can't really show you.

No.

Anyways, yeah, so let's go. And then it's Facebook.

Well, good for retargeting, but good for like being specific with like campaigns that you're running or different automations you have in the background. That is super nice. I like that. I'm definitely stealing this right after this call. Yeah.

Good. Now let's talk about ad platforms. Some ad platforms like Facebook don't like you to use redirect URLs.

Okay.

But YouTube, however, seems to not mind it. So I've got a short link over there on YouTube and that is letting me know in the UTM parameters where they're coming from. But over on Facebook you've got to use the link directly and they've got their own UTM parameters for tracking on each one of their ads at the very bottom.

Fair enough. You know, speaking of. Well, this Isn't really. You may do this for YouTube, may do it for Facebook as well. But like a lot of people will have affiliate, affiliate links for things that are promoting for their brand. Right. I feel like YouTube's a big one that people are doing it on or Facebook too. So we might as well mention that as another use case here. Having the crazy long affiliate links are kind of ugly. So like, you know, sharing that with somebody, they might think you're crazy. They'll. I don't know, if they have to think twice, they're probably not going to click on it.

Right.

So you can beautify your links as well using this, which has been really nice. I do this for specific affiliate platforms as well. Like clickfunnels for instance. Right. And just have it so it's like one simple word afterwards your domain forward, slash, click, click, funnels or like whatever, whatever product that you might be pushing out there. It's pretty nice. I, David used this as well, right? Yes. Don't tell me I'm the only one there. Make your life easy. Yeah. Okay, so let me, let me.

Hold on.

Before we get too far away from.

Tracking in your team parameters, let me give an example.

Okay.

Can you share. Can you click on the tab the top left? I think you're showing the, the actual setup.

Yeah. You're talking about this right here.

Yeah.

Top left. There you go.

New short link. Very good. There it is. So on the, on the side, right there on the right, we got the different UTM parameters. So source is like the platform. So I set meta medium. They've got different platforms. So I said Facebook, that could be anything, like you know, a video or it could be an image. It's like the mode of, of communication. And then campaign, Black Friday campaign. The term could be like a special keyword term. If you're doing a self defense program, it could be self defense. And then content is like what post was it or what ad number was it?

Got it.

So now let's go back to our, our page. Our live preview page.

Yeah.

And let's scroll down. Is it. Let's refresh.

You know, actually I'm refresh this page.

There we go. Beautiful. So let's go click on that bottom link there and pay attention to the URL up at the top. Now it's got all the UCM parameters strung there at the back end of that URL.

Nice. Yeah.

Now whenever we go and we click to register. Let's go ahead and, let's go ahead and do that. Just enter any thing and then we'll go show them. We'll show the people the goods.

Plus one. Beautiful. It's a lovely testing email. I like it. Let's say. Nice.

Okay, now it looks like all this, all the emails there are testing. I'm not quite sure but yeah, go find that contact real quick and show.

Oh no. Did I even opt in? Let me check.

Let me share my screen. I got it.

Oh, is it showing? I got.

Okay, can you see, you see mine?

There we go.

And they are going to appear right here.

Nice. Yeah, super easy. Okay, that is convenient. I like that.

Very convenient. Now the other way that you can do it is over here using the funnel analytics right here, coaching corner.

Okay.

Analytics right there. You gotta scroll to the right and then on the right hand side there's a little filter icon. We click that first or last visit? First visit UTM source, call it meta.

We're getting crazy here.

We're getting crazy. We don't want to get too far away. I know this is the only thing, but that's how you do it right there.

Okay.

And then just don't forget to change your time period.

All right, perfect.

Back to you.

I like it. Okay, very cool. Well, the main thing that we're covering and I want to stress here is that we're beautifying your links. Okay. That's the main thing we're talking about today. This short links app is a great way to make brand friendly beautiful links that people are not going to think twice about. One, you're happy that it has your branding on it. It's not just random bitly link that has nothing to do with any brand. It's indistinguishable compared to if you have something clean like this. Right. So we have like yourdomain.com super long URL here versus just a nice little clean start there. Yeah, that's the main thing. And then it also makes it easy to go in and update that link as needed, depending on what you're going and doing. Right. We gave the example of emails, we gave the example of QR codes. Again, can't stress how much or yeah, how much. I recommend doing short links for any automated emails you have set up. Especially for doing like webinars, you have call links added or, or like you have a specific location for a course or something you want someone to check out. Instead of having to go each email one at a time to go and preview and or you know, edit the contents of that link. You can change it in one location, which is the short link link editor and it updates everywhere. That's it. I don't know how much more simple it can be, to be honest. If I knew that. Again, we're talking hours of time here, guys. Hours of save time. Do yourself a favor, please. Yes.

This will also help you keep. Keep your beautiful hair in your head so you won't be pulling your hair out.

That's why I'm wearing. That's where. If you guys ever wonder why, why I wear hats, it's usually because of that. Yeah.

Hey, by the way, in case if you didn't know, if you have any questions or comments, we, we do our best to actually look at all these comments and answer them and get as soon as possible. And we also base our our videos based off of your questions. What are your most pressing stumbling blocks or, you know, slowdowns? Whenever you're building through ClickFunnels or actually even just through business strategy as well too, let us know and we will do our best to address your questions in the upcoming Coaching Corner videos. Yeah, and you can also reach out to us. Please send us your questions and your comments. Any feedback@outreachlickfunnels.com okay, we'll be there.

We're listening. We're watching. Reach out anytime we can hop on. A quick call if needed to sort anything else. Happy to help where we, where we can. Yeah. So as a recap here, because it seemed like we have a question on what we covered today, we use the Short Links app inside of ClickFunnels 2.0 to create redirects to custom locations. If we go to Short Links. There we go. Short links. Over here we have all these custom redirects directly in the platform here. Going to a custom location of our choosing. It's really just a way to tidy up your redirect links, make them look wonderful and have them go to the right spot where you want them to go. But also it's, it's more of a technique thing because in the future it's going to save you a lot of editing time and you know, just again, hours of time. Instead of going through each location one at a time to update a link, you can just update it in one location like here, and change it to whatever you want it to be. Right? Yes, that's it. That's the main thing we're trying to get across here.

If you use them, they will probably be your new best friend.

Promise you that is a good yes. Alrighty guys. Well, that is it for this week. Again, if you have any other questions or anything else you want us to cover in a future episode. Reach out to us. We're happy to help, happy to answer questions in the future. And for now, we will catch you later. All right, Sounds good.

Thanks for joining, everyone. We hope it's helpful.

All right, ciao for now. See you.