What are Smart Links?

SmartLink domains will cease operation after December 31, 2020. To read more about the end of life for SmartLinks, please click here.

Smart links are, well, smart.

Smart links “automagically” transform long links with meaningless character strings into short, word-based descriptive links. So instead of your web page URL being a randomly-generated string of characters, smart links use real words to describe your web page.

Okay, but how does this work? That depends on the content at the destination URL. BL.INK crawls the destination page and suggests links that match the content. All you have to do is paste your URL, scroll, and choose among five different suggestions.

• Step 1: Paste a long link to an existing web page
• Step 2: Scroll through descriptive link choices
• Step 3: Choose the one that best fits your content

Here’s a good example:

Our customers report that using smart links brings higher audience engagement and drives more clicks. There are a few reasons using smart links can help boost your business:

Reduces FOCTWT (Fear of Clicking the Wrong Thing):

Before people choose to click on your link, they want some idea of what they’ll find. Otherwise, why should they bother? And what if that link takes them somewhere they DON’T want to go? Anything that gives your users pause may affect the outcome and you could lose the click. So give your audience a confidence boost. When you use smart links, they’ll see your link and immediately know what it’s is all about. Instead of bit.ly/gbdygk123 they’ll see something like dessert.recipes/cookies. Isn’t that more enticing?

Reinforces your message.

Because they use real words, smart links are memorable and convey your messages, wherever they appear – in ad campaigns, email outreach, and more.

Features, features, features.

Not only does your link say something, but in combination with the BL.INK platform, it can DO a lot of really useful things. For example, you can reuse the same smart link but swap in a new destination URL as your content or promotion changes. Or dynamically route a link so that a user in France clicks and goes to a French landing page, while a US user who clicks the same link is taken to an English landing page. And then there are analytics to give you all sorts of details about the link performance and who’s clicking, so you can optimize on the fly.

We won’t go into every BL.INK feature here, but if you’d like to geek out on how smart these smart links really are, visit the Features page.

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