If you work in social media or content marketing, you know how valuable shortened links are. With a tool like Bitly, you can quickly create shareable, shortened links—and more easily track how people find your content.
But bitlinks don’t exist in a vacuum. You need to generate and track them based on activity in other apps like your blog, email marketing tool, and more. Instead of trying to create and manage your bitlinks manually, you can use automation to streamline the process.
Zapier lets you create automated workflows (called Zaps) that connect Bitly to the other apps you use every day. Here’s how.
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To get started with a Zap template—what we call our pre-made workflows—just click on the button. It only takes a few minutes to set up. You can read more about setting up Zaps here.
Automatically shorten content links
Bitly is a great tool for shortening links, but normally, you have to manually copy-paste the original URL into Bitly to shorten it. That doesn’t sound like a lot of work, but it’s one more task to do—and if you create a high volume of content, shortening each and every link can quickly eat up a lot of your day.
Thankfully, you can use automation to take manual work out of the process. Use one of these Zaps to automatically create bitlinks every time you publish a new piece of content.
Track Bitly links in a spreadsheet
Of course, creating bitlinks is just the first step. You also need to track those links and keep them handy so you can use them later—usually by pasting them into a doc or spreadsheet. But manually copying and pasting doesn’t work at scale.
With automation, you can streamline the process of tracking new bitlinks so you always have an up-to-date list of your links. With these Zaps, you can automatically add new bitlinks to a spreadsheet or database as a new row so they’re cataloged in a central place.
You can also do the opposite. If you keep a list of new content URLs in a spreadsheet, for example, you can use a Zap to automatically generate bitlinks every time you add a new row.
Create shareable Bitly links for marketing campaigns
Bitlinks often play a crucial role in marketing campaigns, giving you an easy way to direct your audience to read new content, sign up for an email newsletter, and more. But if you’re running multiple campaigns across several channels, it can be challenging to keep up with the number of bitlinks you need.
That’s where automation comes in. You can create automated workflows that seamlessly generate bitlinks for new campaigns, social media posts, and other marketing initiatives.
Get notifications for new Bitly links
Automating your bitlink creation is a great way to reduce manual work—but how will you know when there’s a new bitlink ready? The answer might surprise you: by using a little more automation!
For example, you can create a Zap that automatically notifies you about every new bitlink. You can choose to receive those notifications wherever you spend the most time—like in a Slack channel or in your email inbox.
Streamline your content marketing with Bitly and Zapier
Marketing teams need to move quickly, so eliminating manual work can really streamline everyday processes that slow you down. By connecting Bitly to your other critical apps with Zapier, you can make link shortening and sharing a breeze—so you can focus on your content strategy.
