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yourchurchURL.com…? – Ministry-Branded URL Shorteners

Posted by John Saddington on Aug 4, 2009

cokeurl

Coke announced recently that they now are beginning to use CokeURL.com as a URL Shortener for their brand. I think this is particularly brilliant, so why not have churches and non-profits create one? It’s really easy to do and a very cost-effective way of promoting the brand.

As Mashable says:

With retweeting becoming the currency of Twitter (and perhaps soon Facebook), having your own branded URLs means a lot of potential exposure for your company as users see your URLs instead of those of a conventional URL shortener.

It also could create a perception of trust in the links – i.e., people are more apt to click something that looks like a known brand name than a random 4 or 5 letter combination of letters.

So is this something you’d suggest to your ministry to do? What are your thoughts?

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John Saddington

John is the Chief Editor @ The 8BIT Network and Senior Blog Junkie here at ChurchCrunch.He enjoys Triple-Tall Americanos, developing Wordpress Themes, and a few other Random Things.

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12 Responses to “yourchurchURL.com…? – Ministry-Branded URL Shorteners”

  1. Paul Steinbrueck
    Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 8:01 pm

    I agree it's a great idea. Its been on my list to for OurChurch.Com for a while now. Pretty sure there are free scripts out there that will take care of everything for you too.

    Reply
  2. Atiba de Souza
    Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 8:04 pm

    I think this is particularly genius. As church marketers we are into branding and our brand is crucial because it represents Jesus. I've seen a Porn URL in 1 tweet and a church url that both use bit.ly and to the unsuspecting person they may think that bit.ly represents porn and not realize its a generic shortner. maybe we can create a Chirst.ly for churches.

    http://twitter.com/AtibadeSouza

    Reply
    • Jim
      Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 10:48 pm

      good idea

      Reply
  3. kevincooper
    Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at 2:07 pm

    How can URL shortening affect SEO? Since the shorteners use random characters, how will this have an impact?

    Reply
    • Paul Steinbrueck
      Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at 2:55 pm

      Kevin, a URL shorter doesn't change the actual URL of any of the pages, so you can still have keywords in your domain, path, and filename to help SEO. But depending on the service it could affect whether those links help your site in search engines.

      When someone links directly to a page on your site, that helps it in search engines. But if someone posts a link to the short URL instead, the URL shortening service would have to use a 301 redirect to ensure the short URL passes "link juice" to your site.

      Reply
    • Mark Alves
      Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 2:49 am

      The random characters won't matter from an anchor text perspective because it's a standalone link pointing elsewhere. If you're using (or developing) a shortener that uses a 301 redirect then you'll still get most of the value of the in-bound link. Here's a recap of which shorteners pass link juice:
      http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-sh...

      Reply
      • Paul Steinbrueck
        Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 11:00 am

        Mark, thanks for the link, that's a great article!

        Reply
  4. benboles
    Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    Which Wordpress URL shortener plugin do you use?

    Reply
  5. KevinRossen
    Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 6:06 pm

    If your domain is on Google Apps you there's a free option in the Google Solutions Marketplace. Check it out:
    http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/view...

    I think this is VERY useful for churches for newsletters, bulletins, etc, because the majority of people are kind of intimidated by technology and don't really know what tinyurl or bit.ly is. They may be hesitant to click the link. But if they saw the church's domain built in they probably would click it without hesitation.

    Here's a link I did using my personal domain that points back to this blog:
    http://go.rossen.net/churchcrunch

    Reply

  1. Posts about Mashable as of August 4, 2009 » The Daily Parr

    [...] let us all know that he is online, and even using Tweetdeck to post to both Twitter and Facebook. yourchurchURL.com…? – Ministry-Branded URL Shorteners – churchcrunch.com 08/04/2009 Coke announced recently that they now are beginning to use [...]