Owning your own domain is important in building your brand and Platform. As sharing has increased in importance over the last few years through services like Facebook and Twitter having a custom URL to share you information has also become helpful. The limited number of characters allowed by Twitter make services like bit.ly, goo.gl popular to save precious characters.

CAUTION: This is complicated stuff for some people so I take zero responsibility if you mess something up on your domain. Use a domain that you use for nothing else.

UPDATE: One user had their URL updated and functioning in 20 minutes today. Mine took over 24 hours. So be patient and let me know if you get it to work!

You can now create your own custom short URL to extend your branding throughout your own site and social media reach. One ALTERNATIVE to this process is to use a subdomain to your domain if it’s short enough. My friend Cliff Ravenscraft uses l.gspn.tv for his vanity URL which works well because his gspn.tv URL is so short. I created atraub.us to use as my vanity URL. Here’s an example of what a Twitter message could look like with three different URLs and how many characters each one totals.

No custom URL – How to fix your nag of a wife – http://www.takepermission.com/babh-podcast/how-to-fix-your-nagging-wife-babh-016/ – (114)

Bit.ly custom URL – How to fix your nag of a wife – http://bit.ly/xLgHsx – (52)

Self-hosted custom URL – How to fix your nag of a wife – http://atraub.us/yoKmZX – (55)

The last link starting with http://www.atraub.us was created with the following tools.

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