How To Shorten Links & Make Money (Highest Paying URL Shorteners Revealed)

There are many ways to earn money online, but did you know that you can actually shorten links & make money?

That’s right, thanks to certain free URL shorteners you can actually shorten links & get paid.

It’s literally as straight forward as it sounds & it can be a great way to earn money (especially since anybody can do it).

In this blog post, I’m going to share with you the highest paying URL shorteners & I’ll also reveal some of the best ways that you can earn money by shortening links, even if you’re new to URL shortening.

So basically, if you want to shorten links & get paid, this blog post has got you covered.

How To Shorten Links & Make Money   |   Ninja Way To Get People To Click Your Links   |   Highest Paying URL Shorteners   |   Avoiding URL Shortener Scams   |   Increase Your Earnings

How To Shorten Links & Make Money

In case you don’t already know, as the name suggests, URL shortener websites basically enable you to create shortened versions of links to make them easier to remember.

An example is that they could convert a link like this:

https://www.livingmoreworkingless.com/affiliate-marketing/

To a link like this:

https://cutt.ly/eyjArQC

Which is great if you want to post your links on a place like Twitter where you’re restricted by how many characters you can actually use in your post.

But on top of just helping you to shorten links, they also often provide you with the opportunity to earn money from your shortened links too.

They’re able to do this because they typically place an advert in between the newly created link, and the final destination page that it’s due to redirect to.

The advert pages you’re presented with after clicking the shortened link generally ask you to wait a number of seconds before you can continue to the destination page & they usually look somewhat like this:

No doubt you’ll have probably already seen one similar in the past.

As you can see in the top right-hand corner of the screenshot above it tells you that you must wait 5 seconds & then as soon as you’ve patiently waited, you’ll be provided with a button to skip the ad & continue to the destination page, like this:

For every person that waits for the full duration, the URL shortener company will get paid money by the advertiser & they’ll pass a percentage of this down to you in return for sending the visitor via their shortened link.

Make sense?

So in order to shorten links & get paid, realistically there are 2 things you need to do.

• You firstly need to shorten some links
• And then you secondly need to get visitors clicking through those links.

The ads typically payout on a per-impression basis, which means the more people that you manage to get clicking your links & viewing the ads, the more money you’ll make.

Thankfully, though, it’s pretty easy to do.

As an example, you could create a video on YouTube & add a shortened link into the description, or you could put it into a post & publish it via your social media account.

Or if you’ve got a website, you could change the outbound links on your website to redirect via URL shortener services (which a LOT of websites do).

The website method is, in my opinion, one of the best methods & the good news is that if you don’t yet have a website, you can learn how to create one for free here.

But on top of those methods, there’s also another ninja method for getting paid by shortening links which involves leveraging free file hosting websites.

The Ninja Method For Getting People To Click Your Links

Basically, what you’ll do is obtain a popular file that many people want (such as a viral video) & add it to a password-protected .zip archive using a free tool like 7zip.

Then, you’ll host the password somewhere online & shorten the link to it.

Once you’ve done that, save the shortened link into a text file named password.txt, then add both the password.txt file and the password-protected archive together into a new (non-password-protected) archive.

Finally, upload the newly created archive to a free file hosting website & share the link to it online.

That way, you’ll get people beginning to download the file & then they’ll realize that they need a password to unzip the archive, so they’ll be forced to click via your shortened link to access it.

They’ll get the file they wanted, and you’ll earn money.

It’s a win-win.

What Are The Highest Paying URL Shorteners?

When it comes to making money online, whether that be through URL shorteners or any other method, what you first have to understand is that the easier the task is, the less you’ll typically be able to earn from it.

So that means when it comes to getting paid for shortening links, realistically you’re not going to find yourself getting rich (or even getting close, for that matter).

URL shorteners can be great for “extra” money, but if you really are in pursuit of earning the “big” money then, to be honest, I’d recommend you try something like affiliate marketing instead.

Either way, without further ado here are what I believe to be the highest paying URL shorteners:

1. ShrinkEarn

It seems that making money by shortening links is hugely popular in India & so to begin this list I’ve decided to showcase one of the highest paying URL shorteners in India, ShrinkEarn.

ShrinkEarn is super simple to use, provides you with tracking for your links & enables you to cash-out as soon as you’ve earned just $5.

Plus, they also pay out referral commissions too, meaning that if you sign up to ShrinkEarn & refer friends, you can get paid 20% of their earnings as well as your own.

So if you’re looking for the highest paying URL shortener in India, ShrinkEarn might be worth a shot.

2. Shorte.st

Ironically, Shorte.st doesn’t actually provide the shortest URLs out of all of the link shorters but it does pay competitive rates & has over 1.5 million members from around the world.

Plus, if you can deliver a USA audience through to your Shorte.st links then they even claim that they’ll pay you a whopping $14 per 1,000 views, which is pretty impressive.

What’s important to take into consideration here, however, is that those earnings reflect a “perfect” 1,000 visitors & not the typical 1,000.

That means if all 1,000 have cookies enabled, Flash Player switched on, JavaScript enabled & view the advert for the full duration, etc, then you might earn $14.

Realistically, per the typical 1,000 visitors, the payout will actually be much lower as some will be filtered out due to not meeting the criteria.

Either way, it’s still a promising paying link shortener to check out.

3. Adf.ly

Adf.ly is one of the longest-running, most well-known & most trusted paying link shortener websites in existence.

If you have any concerns about legitimacy & getting paid on time, then Adf.ly will probably be your best bet as in my opinion, they are likely the most trustworthy.

Unfortunately, however, whilst Adf.ly do pay relatively well, they do have quite strict criteria with regards to what visitors will actually be counted towards your earnings.

Still, given their solid reputation, you won’t go wrong by trying Adf.ly.

4. LinkBucks

It’s pretty common for paying URL shorteners to bite the dust & disappear but LinkBucks is yet another paying URL shortener that has been around for quite a while (since 2005 to be precise).

It’s also a pretty high paying URL shortener too.

The only downside about LinkBucks is that their minimum withdrawal limit is set at $10 which is slightly higher than some of the others in this list, but given their good reputation, it’s not too big a worry.

5. Ouo.io

Ouo.io claims to be one of the top 3 paying URL shorteners in the world & it also boasts the highest rates for Tier 2 & Tier 3 countries.

Plus, Ouo.io also state that they’ll pay for multiple views from the same user too, which is extremely uncommon when it comes to these types of paid link shorteners.

They have over 1.1 million members & they pay members their earnings twice a month (on the 1st & 15th). They also cover all withdrawal feels, so there are no extra costs.

What you earn, you get to keep.

So Ouo.io is another one that you can try out inline with the others that I’ve already listed above.

Trial & Error

Ultimately when it comes to finding the highest paying link shortener it’s partly a case of trial & error since each company pays different amounts for different types of traffic.

This means that you need to find out what works best for your traffic because what works well for me, may not work so well for you if your visitors are coming from different countries.

So whilst those URL shorteners that I’ve listed above are indeed what I believe to be the highest-paying, I’d still recommend giving them all a try & split-testing them against each other with your own traffic to find the highest-paying of them all.

Avoid Paid URL Shortener Scams

There are many other websites online that claim to list paying URL shorteners & you’ve probably noticed that they list a heck of a lot more shorteners than I have above.

The problem?

Unfortunately, many of them are scams.

You see, there are a lot of URL shorteners claiming to offer large amounts of money in return for traffic but the members that sign up & use them report that they never get paid.

So in my list above, I have decided to only include what I believe to be the safest, highest-paying URL shorteners to prevent you from wasting your time or getting scammed.

How To Earn More Money With URL Shorteners

Shortening links & making money from the clicks on your links is typically only one of the ways that you can earn money with a URL shortener service.

You see, most of them also run things called referral programs & in reality, in order to earn the good money with URL shorteners it’s these referral programs that you want to pay attention to.

The referral programs enable you to refer other members (such as friends & family) and collect a percentage of their earnings too – which can often be up to 20%.

So whilst shortening links itself can be one good source of revenue, it’s also a good idea to try to participate in the referral programs & get others to join underneath you so that you can earn from their earnings too.

As an example, here is the kind of money that you can earn from referrals alone:

And that is just from one platform.

So my advice, if you are looking to earn the maximum amount of money from URL shorteners is to both shorten links & then also try to get referrals who’ll shorten links too.

Plus, as I mentioned further up in this blog post, if you really want to earn the “big” money you could also try your hand at affiliate marketing which you can learn more about here.

But whatever you decide to do, I hope that my post here has helped you to find the highest paying URL shorteners & given you some helpful tips to make more money.

Feel free to leave any comments below.