How many times have you wanted to know exactly how many times that link you put in your blog post has been clicked? Have you ever wanted to shorten those long, ugly affiliate URLs? Well, if you answered “Yes” to either of those questions, Simple URLs is the plugin for you.
Simple URLs is a URL management system allowing you to create, edit and track any URL you want.
Now, I know there are URL shortening services out there that will do this for you, but when you’re placing links on your OWN site, it’s a bit unprofessional to link off to a URL shortening service. With Simple URLs, the links you publish will be from your own domain.
And although it’s popular to use page redirects to mask your affiliate links, this creates two very big problems:
1. There’s no way to tell how many times that link has been clicked.
2. As Otto points out, having too many pages can be a serious performance issue.
Simple URLs uses custom post types with a custom permalink structure, so performance and scalability issues are a thing of the past!
Download
You can get yourself a copy of the FREE Simple URLs plugin at the WordPress Plugins directory – go ahead and download it there.
Here are just a few of the possible uses of the Simple URLs plugin:
1. Affiliate links
2. Banner, button, or text link advertisements.
3. Links to your other blogs and websites.
4. Links to your Twitter and Facebook pages
5. Internal (as opposed to outbound) link tracking.
6. Download link counter!
7. … and any other link you can think of!!!
Here’s a screenshot of the Simple URLs Admin page:
(click image for larger size)
Here’s a screenshot of the Simple URLs Add URL page:
(click image for larger size)