How to set up website redirects

In Your Marketing Lounge today I’m sharing a fantastic web tip from Jessica Stansberry(with her permission) from her Tech Tip Alert post.

She’s American so she starts “Did y’all know that you can use your own domain as a redirect service?”

What this means is that you can create branded urls with your website domain to redirect to other web pages. For example my website domain is www.yourmarketingspecilaist.co.uk and if I wanted a url for my social media accounts branded with my domain I could set up yourmarketingspecialist.co.uk/facebook or yourmarketingspecialist.co.uk/twitter

This technique doesn’t create a new page on your website, it simply creates a web address – the url -which redirects to the Facebook or Twitter page in these examples.

This is a great way to brand external urls, especially if they are long or not very user friendly. You can even play around with the words in the new url, if you are redirecting to Eventbrite you might want to use yourdomain/eventbrite but you could also use your domain/events or your domain/buytickets

You can also use this technique for any affiliate links, for example I recommend Moo.com for business cards and earn a commission if you use my affiliate link which is and difficult to remember so I’m going to change this to yourmarketingspecialist.co.uk/moo which looks way more professional and customer friendly.

I know your next question is now How do I set up a redirect?

This is something you need to do on your server or in your c panel with your web hosting company, for example I use Name Cheap but the instructions are similar for other hosts like Go Daddy, Blue Host etc. It only takes a couple of minutes and is easy when you know how. Check out my video tutorial and follow these 8 easy steps to set up your web redirects.

1. Log into your c panel or host server
2. Find the Domains section
3. Click on redirects
4. Select the domain you want to use for the new referring address
5. Enter the extension you want to use after the forward slash e.g. /facebook
6. Enter the external url you want the new url to refer to (remember to include http://)
7. Click add

Alternatively you can Google how to set up redirects in *Name Cheap* (*insert your web host* or follow these links

How to set up redirects in Go Daddy

How to set up redirects in Bluehost

How to set up redirects in Wix

Which redirect are you going to set up first?