Of all the Twitter third party services, the one I am probably most excited about is Adjix. At its most basic, Adjix is a link shortening service much like the popular TinyURL. But while you may be quick to dismiss it as nothing more than a TinyURL copycat, upon closer examination, their service is much much more.
Adjix is a very powerful, free tool that can be used on multiple Twitter accounts at once and also used to get statistics about who is reading what you post, schedule posts for the future, and make money from the links you Tweet. They are still in BETA but already have so many great features, I am very excited for their future.
To start with, Adjix allows you to track the links you send out on Twitter with statistics called Link Stats. Each one of these stats provides some powerful information about every link you send out on Twitter, regardless of if its a link to your own content or just something you found on the web. Link Stats can:
- give you a screenshot of the link you tweeted
- show how many links you have sent out on Twitter in a given time period
- list every link you tweeted based on the exact date and time you tweeted them
- show how many people clicked the link when you sent it out
- give you the exact time that each of those people clicked your link as well as their host and IP if available
- indicate where they clicked the link from (were they reading from inside the Twitter homepage, a third party program, an RSS reader, a website where you are sourcing your tweets, etc)
While most of you already see the huge potential for this tool, let me give you some examples of a few uses.
- You can easily tell which kind of links you tweet are of the most interest (get the most clicks) to your followers
- You can easily tell what time is the best one for tweeting a link if you want it to be clicked
- You can see how much your opinion matters to your downline by tracking how often your followers click links that you retweet
- You have an easy to access list of all your past tweeted links including screenshots of easy reference
Now, how does Adjix do this? Adjix works by loading the site you tweet within their tracking frame so that they can get the tracking info for you. How obtrusive their frame is, though, is the next cool part about this service. You can opt for no frame at all, which will likely be your best option if you want to use it only for tracking purposes but, if you opt to show their ad stripe, you can actually make money from using their service.
To me, Adjix is the first way to make money on Twitter that actually might work. Unlike the other attempts to make money on Twitter, the Adjix site stripe is actually completely trackable so advertisers can see if their ads are working (the biggest complain of TwitAds) and, unlike Magpie, doesn’t annoy your followers with obtrusive tweets or send out tweets as you. It is the first Twitter monetizer that just ads advertising to the one thing everyone was already doing on Twitter anyway, sending out links. If you are curious what the ad bar looks like, here is a sample link (will open in a new window).
As you can see, the stripe is not only unobtrusive but also easily removable with one click (click “Remove ad” in the top right hand corner to try it). Within your account, you can decide which kind of ads you want your stripe to show across your entire account (for instance, only Humor ads or only News ads depending on the focus of your Twitter conversation) or leave it on a Random Ad. Even if you select Random, you get the option to override this with each individual tweet. If you are tweeting a link about food, for instance, you can opt to have Food and Drink ads show for that link only or just leave it as the default.
Another really useful feature is their browser buttons which automatically shrink the link of the page you currently are on using Adjix, let you write a Tweet to accompany the link and select the type of ad you want to go out with it and Tweet it to Twitter right from your browser of choice without having to log in to Twitter, Adjix, or another third party service. You can also schedule links to tweet in the future from this same screen so its a very powerful little widget. You can set up a different widget button for each Twitter account so you can easily send links to the relevant account without logging in and out of Twitter.
If you are using TwitterFeed to import your blog, eBay items or other RSS feed to your Twitter account, you can set TwitterFeed to automatically use Adjix to shrink links instead of another service. Just select Adjix from the drop down menu in the preferences section under link shrinking and put your account key in the available spot and then every link you tweet from a feed will also be traceable and, if you opt into it, able to earn income. So far, TwitterFeed is the only third party posting tool to embrace this (that I am aware of) so for manual links, you just need to use the Adjix widget.
Now, while the focus of this post is Twitter, Adjix can be used in many other applications, but I figured you could make that leap yourself.
For me, the link statistics are more valuable than any ad revenue the site stripe earns (though I did leave the ad stripe on to see what kind of results it gave) and it’s a huge step up from TinyURL who shrinks your link but doesn’t give you anything in return. For a free service, it’s got some amazing features and, even if Adjix isn’t the one to hit it big, ad stripes on links you tweet is likely going to be the future of Twitter earning.
