2 Free Digital Tools To Help You Move Traffic Online
These 2 tools from Cloudflare will both help you move folks where you want them to be.
Happy Every-Other-Tuesday!
Are you familiar with the concept of vanity URLs? I’m OBSESSED with them!
I have a podcast called Step Up Your Social. I own StepUpYourSocial.com. But if you visit that URL, it simply reroutes you to a landing page on my website (try it and watch the switch happen).
I did a whole episode of Step Up Your Social about vanity URLs. There’s even an accompanying video. You can check that out here.
Needless to say, I own tons of vanity URLs.
But here’s the thing - recently they haven’t been working as well as they used to…
Know anyone who might appreciate what we’re doing here? Invite them to join us! As you know, we’re all really nice, and cool, and we all LOVE free digital tools!
Cloudflare URL Redirecting
Tool type: Infrastructure Tool
Okay, Cloudflare does a bunch of things. But today, we’re focusing on how it can help you with vanity URLs.
One of the MANY vanity URLs I own is mooch.lol, which redirects to my Scaramucci Calculator.
Recently, my calculator was getting a ton of traffic and I shared that fact on LinkedIn.
Someone replied that the URL (which again, is a vanity URL) didn’t work.
Which is so annoying. I had tested it that morning in Firefox and it worked fine. But sure enough, in Chrome, it wasn’t working.
That led me down a rabbit hole where I came across this free digital tool.
I went to Cloudflare and set up a free HTTPS redirect for my domain. Now, it works flawlessly in every browser. And not only is the redirect more reliable, I’m pretty sure it’s also faster!
I wrote up step-by-step instructions to set this up, which you can find here.
The whole thing takes maybe 5 minutes and is easy to do, even if you’re not tech-savvy.
FREE or FREEmium: FREE
Cloudflare has plenty of paid features. This one is completely free!
Cloudflare Email Routing
Tool type: Infrastructure Tool
So along with redirecting a URL, Cloudflare will also reroute an email adress for you for free.
Head here to get started.
So let’s say you have a vanity URL and you want to match the URL’s email without having a whole new email address. This tool will let you do just that.
You set up the email and the redirect and then [fun@my-vanity-url.com] will redirect to your Gmail or Outlook. Or wherever.
I’ll say I’ve never used this tool. And I’ve seen some folks talking about getting stuck in spam when trying to send emails using this service.
But that can be true of Gmail too at times.
Regardless, this can be helpful to receive emails, whether or not you use it to send them.
I personally pay the few dollars a month to Google to use my professionally branded email. But if I was going to have an email address to accompany each of my many, many vanity URLs, this is how I would do it.
FREE or FREEmium: FREE
Same deal as above - they do have paid tools. This one is free.
Hope these were helpful!
Whether you use either of these tools today, or sometime down the road, they both seem good to know about.
If you haven’t already checked out the episode of Step Up Your Social, you should! The whole thing is less than 7 minutes long and will give you a good overview of what vanity URLs are and why you should definitely be using them.
Listen to the ep, or watch the video, here.
If you like Free Digital Tools, you probably know others who will too. Invite them to join us. They’ll appreciate it… as will I!
And now, when you refer your friends, you also get free stuff!!
See you in a fortnight.
Josh
joshklemons.com