Blair Williams has been working as a Software Engineer and Internet Marketer for over a decade. He specializes in writing and leveraging Software drive explosive growth in Businesses of all sizes. He's an expert in WordPress, Ruby on Rails, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing, Website Strategy and New Media.
Blair is the author of the Pretty Link, Mingle & several other plugins for WordPress. Between them, Blair's plugins have been downloaded almost 200,000 times and are some of the most popular plugins for WordPress. In addition to these plugins, Blair has created Pretty Link Pro which is a premium upgrade to Pretty Link and provides a ton of useful features and premium support.
Twitter Comments
treesasha How To Start Shrinking Links On Your Domain Name in 5 minutes: Pretty http://blairwilliams.com/plintro (via @prettylink)
whoisSethRoach RT @blairwilli: How To Start Shrinking Links On Your Domain Name in 5 minutes: Pretty http://blairwilliams.com/plintro (via @prettylink)
Thanks for the Pretty Link Plugin and the supporting videos. This is easy to follow and helpful. I am just reviewing the first video so hope you don’t mind me commenting as I get to review other videos
I have pro vertion, but I have a big problem. All my posts starts with wide image, so when I chose the twitter bagde to stay in top right with text wrap, it appears in the back of the image. Do you think you can help me fixing it? Please write, I really need it. I don’t use the badge because of it! Thanks a lot! love your plugin!
After reading some of the problems you’ve been having it seems more likely to me that you’ve got a plugin that’s not working very well with WordPress. Try disabling all your plugins and see if this error goes away. If so, re-enable your plugins one by one until you find which one is the culprit.
Daryl, It’s always a good idea to stay up to date with the latest version of WP. Before updating WP it’s always a good idea to make sure your plugins will still be compatible. But lets address your issue at hand. I would recommend temporarily de-activating all your plugins and then try the update again. If you still have the error let us know.
Hi, Could someone please share with me why it is beneficial to use a Pretty Link for my internal pages? Why wouldn’t I just edit the permalink to “Beyonce” or whatever my desired name is? Hang on… Is it for tracking purposes? If so, I guess I’d better watch the tracking video next! )
Pretty link is most beneficial to have links that point to your site that actually redirect the users somewhere other than your site when they click the link. It’s purpose isn’t to be overly beneficial for your own pages/posts but yes it can be very useful for tracking link clicks and conversions….especially with Pro version.
Where I can learn more about Pretty Links? There’s only one video that I can see I have access to. Does Pretty Link cloak links eg affiliate links? Can I use Pretty Links off site eg Squidoo, HubPages, etc.?
I downloaded, installed, setup, and created my first pretty links within about 20 minutes. What a great plugin. You have really done a great job. Thanks for the free stuff. I will probably convert to pro in a short while. This is the best. I was using Tiny Url and I never liked the way my links looked. This way my links look like my own. How cool is that? Thanks again
At 4:06of the first video you show how you copy the link and move it to a new tab. The window image is one I don’t recognize, probably because you use a MAC. I don’t understand where you are pasting the link. You said to open a new tab. Where is that tab?
I am very new at this blogging stuff and at the risk of looking pretty dumb, I don’t understand how it works. Is the link supposed to show up in my blog sidebar? nothing shows up at all. I’ve put a link in so where is it? It’s installed and activated etc.
Francine, Pretty Link creates what I’m going to call “Fake” links. For example, let’s say you wanted to send your users to http://google.com without them knowing that’s where they’re going. Well PL lets you do that! You can create a Pretty Link that points to google but looks like http://yoursite.com/tgp. Pretty Links can be very useful for Search Engine Optimization practices and also for tracking how many times a link is clicked. Plus with the Pro version you can do even more cool things. Hope that helps!
If you were thinking about using a link shrinker webservice like bit.ly or goog.le or j.mp and you have your own WordPress blog it would be wiser to use Pretty Links. Otherwise you don’t see any “pretty” things happening to your blog. You just replace the address were you would be linking to in your blogpost with another address generated by Pretty Link. Does that make it any clearer?
Thanks for taking the time to explain things…thought I knew a bit, but….
“link shrinker webservice like bit.ly or goog.le or j.mp and you have your own WordPress blog it would be wiser to use Pretty Links” I do have my own Word press blog but to be quite honest I don’t know what the rest of those things mentioned are So does it show up on WordPress by itself? Perhaps I don’t need it if it’s not that useful to me.
Francine – first thing you need to do is get passed “I don’t understand it, therefore I don’t need it”. You do need it. You just don’t understand WHY you need it. OK? You know the answer is actually quite simple. When people (and I am really referring to Affiliates, here, but it could be any site owner), create links on their blogs/sites to the stuff they want to sell on other people’s sites, they tend to use a third-party link shortener like http://bit.ly or http://tinyurl.com to cover their tracks. This then gives them a link that looks something like this “http://tinyurl.com/2dpdq4y”. The problem that Pretty Link overcomes is that it doesn’t give you a link that refers away from your blog; it cleverly gives you a link that refers to directly to your blog, and so with Pretty Link, you get a link that looks like this “http://virtualcrowds.org/WP3-Launch”. And this is a link which, when the search engines pick it up, gives your site the additional SEO value of some “link love”, and doesn’t give it to somebody else’s site. Get it? So when somebody clicks one of your “pretty links,” wherever you have placed the link, they are immediately brought to your site and instantly referred to site the link was designed to send them to. Is that any clearer? By the way, if any of the terminology I have used is confusing, Google’s your friend, or you can always ask me here or at Virtual Crowds.
Hey, Noob alert !! I just installed and shortened an affiliate link from Hostgator. When I hover over the Hostgator add the url at the bottom of my page is unchanged. I cut and pasted part of the link from my widgets >text box. Am I using the wrong code ? Is there anywhere else I can find “just” my link ? I have a banner add and used “http://secure.hostgator.com/~affiliat/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.blah,blah,blah-” ……without the quotations. Your help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Neil
Hi cartpauj, Thanks for the response. I tried to copy/paste the url from the add into the Target URL field, and it says that it’s successful, but when I go back to the page and hover over the add I can still see my affiliate link.
OK I’ve got it… I followed your advice, but was replacing the whole url, I guess with a banner add you just replace your affiliate link and leave the rest of the code intact, or your banner goes poof !! Very cool, I love it !!! Thanks Neil
I activated the plugin and created my first link OK. I then tried to create a new link doing exactly the same as with the first one and got this message:
ERROR: Link URL must be a correctly formatted url
No matter what I put in, I get the same message? I even deactivated the plugin and deleted it and rthen reinstalled it but still get the same error. It’s driving me nuts – Help!
I’ve been using Pretty Link since an IM coach told me about it. It really helps with redirecting affiliate links via my own domains and gives good tracking data besides. A great tool. Does this use a php script, iframe, or what to accomplish the job? Thanks for creating this!
First thanks for the great plugin, terrific implementation.
I’m having one problem. My pretty bar doesn’t show. All the boxes are checked, I can’t find anything in the options that would repress it. Any thing you could think that I am overlooking??
Charlene, sounds like you’re hosted with hostgator? If so you’ll need to contact them directly and ask them to un-block Pretty Link from their new security feature.
When I use prettylink to cloak an affiliate link do I need to select the ‘Standard Parameter Forwarding’ button to ensure that my affiliate id is correctly forwarded and tracked by the affiliate company that I am working with?
Here’s the scenario: Site A links to my pretty link on site B then redirects to site C for the sales page. The pretty link is a Commission Junction aff link that requires a pixel image to track sales.
Is there a way to use CJ’s pixel images within pretty link?
You can use pretty link to mask the affiliate link by just modifying the code they gave you. This should allow you to use PL to track the affiliate link while at the same time leaving pixel part of the code in tact. You should be able to do both just fine.
I found Pretty Link a couple of days ago. It’s great – thanks! When my wobbly finances improve, I’ll upgrade to the Pro version.
Just one thing… I’ve only watched the first video so far so I don’t know what the others are like, but on this one I thought you were mumbling slightly so I had to crank the volume up a lot to hear what you were saying. The trouble was – I got absolutely blasted by the music at the end!
Please could you speak up a little (my hearing isn’t 100%) and match the audio levels for the speech and music.
I end up on the correct page, but my affiliate id isn’t being picked up. If I use the original link it is. I’m using Forward Parameters off but I couldn’t get it to work with the other options either.
Any ideas what is going wrong and if so, when will it be fixed?
[...] Williams on May 12, 2009 · 18 comments 3 UPDATE: This video is out of date — please watch my new Pretty Link Intro Video I’ve had a ton of requests to put some tutorials up on the site — here’s the [...]
When using keyword replace option, could you possible include an option not to replace...
44 Comments
Thanks for the Pretty Link Plugin and the supporting videos. This is easy to follow and helpful. I am just reviewing the first video so hope you don’t mind me commenting as I get to review other videos
Thanks again
Hi,
I have pro vertion, but I have a big problem.
All my posts starts with wide image, so when I chose the twitter bagde to stay in top right with text wrap, it appears in the back of the image.
Do you think you can help me fixing it?
Please write, I really need it.
I don’t use the badge because of it!
Thanks a lot!
love your plugin!
Renato,
I chose for position “none” and included the template tag at the exact place where I wanted it in my theme. Does that work for you?
I created a pretty link, now how to use it, I’m confused!
I wasn’t able to download this video, could you post it as mov like the others?
And what plugin do you use for twitter comments?
Okay — I posted the mov file for this video as a download — hope it helps — it’s an HD video so it may take a few minutes to download…
The Twitter Comments, Tweet Badge and Social Buttons on my site come from the Pro version of Pretty Link:
Pretty Link Pro
I like it quite a bit
…
When I tried downloading Pretty Link I got this error:
Installing Plugin: Pretty Link 1.4.43
Downloading install package from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/pretty-link.1.4.43.zip.
Warning: curl_init(): Cannot initialize a new cURL handle in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1239
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1271
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1272
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1273
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1274
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1275
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1276
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1277
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1278
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1291
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1297
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1305
Warning: curl_setopt(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1309
Warning: curl_exec(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1324
Warning: curl_error(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1338
Warning: curl_getinfo(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1340
Warning: curl_getinfo(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1348
Warning: curl_close(): supplied argument is not a valid cURL handle resource in /homepages/34/d294047450/htdocs/wp-includes/http.php on line 1351
Download failed.
Your help is greatly appreciated!
Daryl
After reading some of the problems you’ve been having it seems more likely to me that you’ve got a plugin that’s not working very well with WordPress. Try disabling all your plugins and see if this error goes away. If so, re-enable your plugins one by one until you find which one is the culprit.
When I tried to upgrade this is the error message I got:
Error 500 – Internal server error
An internal server error has occured!
Please try again later.
WordPress 2.9.2 is available! Please update now. Should I upgrade this?
Thanks
Daryl
Daryl, It’s always a good idea to stay up to date with the latest version of WP. Before updating WP it’s always a good idea to make sure your plugins will still be compatible. But lets address your issue at hand. I would recommend temporarily de-activating all your plugins and then try the update again. If you still have the error let us know.
i get confused to use this plugin. someone, help me
What parts are confusing you?
Hi,
)
Could someone please share with me why it is beneficial to use a Pretty Link for my internal pages? Why wouldn’t I just edit the permalink to “Beyonce” or whatever my desired name is? Hang on… Is it for tracking purposes?
If so, I guess I’d better watch the tracking video next!
Thanks in advance!
Pretty link is most beneficial to have links that point to your site that actually redirect the users somewhere other than your site when they click the link. It’s purpose isn’t to be overly beneficial for your own pages/posts but yes it can be very useful for tracking link clicks and conversions….especially with Pro version.
Where I can learn more about Pretty Links? There’s only one video that I can see I have access to. Does Pretty Link cloak links eg affiliate links? Can I use Pretty Links off site eg Squidoo, HubPages, etc.?
You’ll have the most flexibility using Pretty Links Pro. Have you been to prettylinkpro.com and viewed the info over there?
I downloaded, installed, setup, and created my first pretty links within about 20 minutes. What a great plugin. You have really done a great job. Thanks for the free stuff. I will probably convert to pro in a short while. This is the best. I was using Tiny Url and I never liked the way my links looked. This way my links look like my own. How cool is that? Thanks again
Paul Palumbo
At 4:06of the first video you show how you copy the link and move it to a new tab. The window image is one I don’t recognize, probably because you use a MAC.
I don’t understand where you are pasting the link. You said to open a new tab. Where is that tab?
Dick, it depends on your web browser. Most browsers will open a new tab by pressing CTRL + T
I am very new at this blogging stuff and at the risk of looking pretty dumb, I don’t understand how it works. Is the link supposed to show up in my blog sidebar? nothing shows up at all.
I’ve put a link in so where is it? It’s installed and activated etc.
Francine,
Pretty Link creates what I’m going to call “Fake” links. For example, let’s say you wanted to send your users to http://google.com without them knowing that’s where they’re going. Well PL lets you do that! You can create a Pretty Link that points to google but looks like http://yoursite.com/tgp. Pretty Links can be very useful for Search Engine Optimization practices and also for tracking how many times a link is clicked. Plus with the Pro version you can do even more cool things. Hope that helps!
Thanks for your reply…but I’m still lost. My questions weren’t really answered. Please just a very basic elementary answer.
If you were thinking about using a link shrinker webservice like bit.ly or goog.le or j.mp and you have your own WordPress blog it would be wiser to use Pretty Links. Otherwise you don’t see any “pretty” things happening to your blog. You just replace the address were you would be linking to in your blogpost with another address generated by Pretty Link.
Does that make it any clearer?
Thanks for taking the time to explain things…thought I knew a bit, but….
“link shrinker webservice like bit.ly or goog.le or j.mp and you have your own WordPress blog it would be wiser to use Pretty Links”
I do have my own Word press blog but to be quite honest I don’t know what the rest of those things mentioned are
So does it show up on WordPress by itself? Perhaps I don’t need it if it’s not that useful to me.
Francine – first thing you need to do is get passed “I don’t understand it, therefore I don’t need it”. You do need it. You just don’t understand WHY you need it. OK? You know the answer is actually quite simple. When people (and I am really referring to Affiliates, here, but it could be any site owner), create links on their blogs/sites to the stuff they want to sell on other people’s sites, they tend to use a third-party link shortener like http://bit.ly or http://tinyurl.com to cover their tracks. This then gives them a link that looks something like this “http://tinyurl.com/2dpdq4y”. The problem that Pretty Link overcomes is that it doesn’t give you a link that refers away from your blog; it cleverly gives you a link that refers to directly to your blog, and so with Pretty Link, you get a link that looks like this “http://virtualcrowds.org/WP3-Launch”. And this is a link which, when the search engines pick it up, gives your site the additional SEO value of some “link love”, and doesn’t give it to somebody else’s site. Get it? So when somebody clicks one of your “pretty links,” wherever you have placed the link, they are immediately brought to your site and instantly referred to site the link was designed to send them to. Is that any clearer? By the way, if any of the terminology I have used is confusing, Google’s your friend, or you can always ask me here or at Virtual Crowds.
Hey, Noob alert !!
I just installed and shortened an affiliate link from Hostgator. When I hover over the Hostgator add the url at the bottom of my page is unchanged.
I cut and pasted part of the link from my widgets >text box.
Am I using the wrong code ? Is there anywhere else I can find “just” my link ?
I have a banner add and used “http://secure.hostgator.com/~affiliat/cgi-bin/affiliates/clickthru.blah,blah,blah-” ……without the quotations.
Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Neil
Neil you need to replace the hostgater URL with your pretty link in the ad itself.
Hi cartpauj,
Thanks for the response.
I tried to copy/paste the url from the add into the Target URL field, and it says that it’s successful, but when I go back to the page and hover over the add I can still see my affiliate link.
Sorry, I must be missing something.
OK I’ve got it… I followed your advice, but was replacing the whole url, I guess with a banner add you just replace your affiliate link and leave the rest of the code intact, or your banner goes poof !!
Very cool, I love it !!!
Thanks
Neil
Hi Blair
I activated the plugin and created my first link OK. I then tried to create a new link doing exactly the same as with the first one and got this message:
ERROR: Link URL must be a correctly formatted url
No matter what I put in, I get the same message? I even deactivated the plugin and deleted it and rthen reinstalled it but still get the same error. It’s driving me nuts – Help!
JC
what are your permalink settings set to?
hi! i like very much this plugin and i wonder how to insert my affiliate link to the target url witch will replace the “http://” of the target url.
example:
Original target url
http://www.google.comThis is what i want to be the target url
http://affiliatelinkhere/www.google.comi hope you understand what i want to achive.
i have this idea but i don’t know to code it
I’ve been using Pretty Link since an IM coach told me about it. It really helps with redirecting affiliate links via my own domains and gives good tracking data besides. A great tool. Does this use a php script, iframe, or what to accomplish the job? Thanks for creating this!
First thanks for the great plugin, terrific implementation.
I’m having one problem. My pretty bar doesn’t show. All the boxes are checked, I can’t find anything in the options that would repress it. Any thing you could think that I am overlooking??
Thanks.
Charlene, sounds like you’re hosted with hostgator? If so you’ll need to contact them directly and ask them to un-block Pretty Link from their new security feature.
ummm thanks. I use Hostmonster, but it may be a similar issue. I’ll contact them…
Thanks
When I use prettylink to cloak an affiliate link do I need to select the ‘Standard Parameter Forwarding’ button to ensure that my affiliate id is correctly forwarded and tracked by the affiliate company that I am working with?
Thanks for your help.
if you’re cloaking the entire affiliate link (including you id) then you can just leave it at standard. Custom is for more advanced capabilities.
Fantastic plugin!
I’m unsure how I can utilize 3rd party pixels.
Here’s the scenario:
Site A links to my pretty link on site B then redirects to site C for the sales page. The pretty link is a Commission Junction aff link that requires a pixel image to track sales.
Is there a way to use CJ’s pixel images within pretty link?
Mahalo
within the same pretty link, no. But why can’t you just leave the tracking pixel as is?
OK,
I’ll just use my cj link and just bypass the pretty link.
I wanted to use pretty link for the tracking. I have the pixel on site A but I wasn’t sure if it would fire on site C after being redirected.
Thanks
You can use pretty link to mask the affiliate link by just modifying the code they gave you. This should allow you to use PL to track the affiliate link while at the same time leaving pixel part of the code in tact. You should be able to do both just fine.
Hi Blair.
I found Pretty Link a couple of days ago. It’s great – thanks! When my wobbly finances improve, I’ll upgrade to the Pro version.
Just one thing… I’ve only watched the first video so far so I don’t know what the others are like, but on this one I thought you were mumbling slightly so I had to crank the volume up a lot to hear what you were saying. The trouble was – I got absolutely blasted by the music at the end!
Please could you speak up a little (my hearing isn’t 100%) and match the audio levels for the speech and music.
Keep up the good work!
Hi again Blair.
I’ve discovered that this kind of affiliate link isn’t working through a PrettyLink:
http://somesite.com/somefolder/something.php?e=MyAffiliateId
I end up on the correct page, but my affiliate id isn’t being picked up. If I use the original link it is. I’m using Forward Parameters off but I couldn’t get it to work with the other options either.
Any ideas what is going wrong and if so, when will it be fixed?
Thanks,
Colin
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[...] Williams on May 12, 2009 · 18 comments 3 UPDATE: This video is out of date — please watch my new Pretty Link Intro Video I’ve had a ton of requests to put some tutorials up on the site — here’s the [...]