Shorten URLs & Get Paid For Your Traffic

Back in 2009, I had one of those ideas: This is either the best idea I’ve ever had – or the worst”.

URL shorteners like Bit.ly were driving monster volumes of traffic, while Skimlinks had proved that there was money to be made swapping links for affiliate links on the fly.

So I made an offer to buy a popular URL shortener when it came up for sale, with a view to putting the two together.

My thinking was that if a tiny percentage were commercial links – a fraction of one percent – the huge volumes of traffic would earn good money.

With millions and millions of redirects being served by even some of the smaller services, this seemed to be a great opportunity.

I canned the project for various reasons, but part of that was seeing data for various on what kind of sites people redirect.

In short: the volume of remotely commercial traffic was a tiny, tiny percentage of my already rockbottom percetage estimate.

Acquisition Engine have just launched a very similar idea, called SHRTN.

Use it to shorten your links on Twitter etc, and they pay you for the traffic. At present, it only works with a handful of affiliate networks, but more are to be added in the coming months:

• Commission Junction
• LinkShare
• Google Affiliate Network

You can join SHRTN here.