Throwing strikes with short URLs with a little promotional branding and a dash of ingenuity.

Throw Strikes with Shorter URLs

In an effort to build traffic for our recently launched baseball site, we recently launched a new online website to shorten URLs. Although, it may seem like everyone is making their own version of the handy technology, we have done a little branding to ours.

Those of you not familiar with the need to shorten URLs may appreciate the practicality of turning a 100-plus character URL into 22 characters. With the frequent use of micro-blogging, instant messaging and email, it is often more convenient to send a shorter URL. While some may say that it would be easier just to copy the entire address bar and send it over, we agree to a certain extent. We also know that there are situations, while communicating virtually, that have some space limitations to take into consideration. That is the first reason why we decided to look into the idea.

The second portion behind our justification was branding. With fairly little overhead and short amount of time, Creative Ops, was able to deploy a URL shortening tool that would compliment the All Arizona Baseball destination location. The domain would be easily recognizable, short and catchy, in the interest of trying to get it to spawn usage.

While traffic on the site is slowly beginning to increase, we have made arrangements to assist local sports website Fanster.com with their 2009 Spring Training coverage, which includes building out the Spring Training portion of their website. While this relationship will serve as an opportunity to increase local exposure in the Phoenix Metro area, we have also planned to partner up with one of the largest, most successful Metro Rail Blogs, Rail Life. Both organizations have been diligently shortening their URLs using the tool and for that we are both gracious and excited. Additional plans for the tool include integration with AZ Hardball.com‘s article pages for the delivery of links to friends.

Check it out today at http://strik.es