Switchy: Quit Guessing and Start KNOWING What is Working

To succeed in internet marketing, you got to know what's working. And today I've got a tool that I absolutely love that's gonna let you know what's working. Welcome to web tools, radio tips and tools for the DIY webmaster Freelancer in marketers who want to get more, engage more and sell more without learning a bunch of code, our website, web tools radio.com. Hey, welcome to Web tools, radio. I am Dave Jackson from the School of podcasting.com. And it dawned on me that I talk about this tool all the time. And I was like, this would be good for web tools, radio, and the tool is called switchy. So if you're tired of sending people to, you know, bit.ly/k m 47869. Yeah, this is what switchy does, it is primarily a link tracker. And I use it all the time. But it does so much more than that, you can actually tie a domain to it. So I tied the domain support this show.com. And what I love about this is, there are other link trackers that you can make, like support this show.com/whatever and support the show.com/whatever. But the actual domain would give you a 404 switchy. If you go to the actual domain. In this case, I haven't redirected to my balmy coffee website. So it's great in tracking links. But it's not just the fact that it's going to track links, because you can see what's working, then it's the fact that you can go in and you can also apply if you're a Facebook person, you can go in and have it apply the Facebook pixel, you can have it apply the Tick Tock pixel. If you're a person that uses UTM tags, you want to make a campaign and put in what the source is and what the medium and what the UTM term is, and all that kind of Google stuff that I think that's where that comes from, you can do that. And the other thing, I love that I was like, wow, that's cool. You put the link in, right. So whatever link you want to direct people to, and it goes out and scans that website, and it will then bring over whatever image they have set to be the image for sharing. And sometimes it's absolutely awful. And so you can have it be from a URL. So if you have an image, that's better, you can action. This is what I love, take a screenshot because sometimes there is no image. So you go a take a screenshot, it goes over to the website, you take a screenshot, and it automatically uploads it, you can do things like Unsplash, and pixel Bay and all the other ones giffy, things like that, so does the image. And you can actually put all your links in different folders, this is what I liked, because I have a ton of links. But I can go into a folder and say, Hey, like I have one just called inbound. And so that's my link from YouTube. It's my link from anything that I'm trying to drive traffic back to my website. So I can easily see which source is bringing me the most traffic, you can actually do deep linking. So if you want to basically go to a website and do a super deep dive into an actual page, you can do that. You can embed things as a widget, I mean, you can cloak your link, I'm not a big fan of that, that's kind of a little gray hat, you can actually add up a redirection, this one's interesting because you can do a B split testing. So let's say you have a website and you have two different pages doing the same thing. You can set that up and have it you know, go in again and see the stats that are working. And you can set it up to see the conversion rate. But you can also add a redirection based on location. So let's say hey, if they're from the US send them to here. If it's from some other place, send them over here, if you want the link to expire. So if you're like hey, click this link to go to my webinar, you can have that actually, you know, turn off after a while. It's it's crazy. And then I just found out that you can use this to make basically what they call smart pages. And smart pages in my book are basically it's a link tree. And so it's super easy to do this. So if you're paying for Link tree, this doesn't matter. I was using a company called link li n q And they gave you a QR code. Oh, did I mention? Yeah, you can get a QR code for every single link. And when I made my smart page now if you want to see this in action, you can go to power of podcasting.com. And you'll see this thing I made with switchy. And I can go in now and look at analytics for this, and see that I've had 127, people click on things, I just did this the other day, I can see where they're coming from, I can see what they're clicking on, I can see what device what browser, they're using what operating system, it's a little crazy. And it's built in this, again, kind of link tree, they call it a smart page that is also built into it. So there's QR codes, there's a Chrome browser extension. So if you're on a website, and you want to turn this into something you're watching, you know, in terms of stats, and all, you can do that you can easily go in and edit these. So what I wish I would have done is if you want to schedule consulting with me, it School of podcasting.com/schedule That's the way to do that, that I'm using a WordPress plugin called pretty links. But what's great about that is later because I recently switched from acuity scheduling to tidy cow. And because I always told people go to school of podcasting.com/schedule, I just had to replace it in one place. But I did find out that I had put the direct link. So this is something that you don't think about now. But I'm now trying to make a link for everything. Because there are times when I'll be promoting something, and either it goes out of business, or they change their business model, or whatever it is. And I'm like, I gotta go back and change all my websites. Now you don't have to, I have one link. And it simply you change the kind of destination link, and you're good to go. You're like okay, Dave, this sounds cool. What does it cost? I bought it when it was on AppSumo. And I just checked as I record this in July of 2023. You can get it for $39 in like a month. No, you get a lifetime deal for $39. Now, they do have a couple of tiers, in the tiers, I think enable you to get you can have more total links or maybe other features, the highest it would be would be 195. If you got five different codes, but to me, it is so worth the money. It's ridiculous all the different things it does. So yeah, you can have it, they're counting clicks per month. So at the $39 value of 30,000 clicks a month, you can have eight custom domains, you can have unlimited links. So what they're looking at is how many clicks do you get. And to me, the $39 value is two smart pages with a logo you can have, you can share this with your team, custom slugs, all sorts of stuff, I think I went with a $78 plan, which is 60,000 clicks and 10 Smart pages. And the beauty of the smart page is I use that to generate a QR code. And when I speak in public at the end, I usually have a last slide that says any questions with a giant QR code on it. And I will see people pull out their phone. And you can have these smart pages. And what's great about it is you can customize that smart page for whatever conference you're speaking at, or whatever the speaking is at. So again, super versatile. And I've never had a problem with it. I've never had any uptime any nothing zero. And you don't really need support, because they have a great knowledge base. And so for me, if you want to know what's working, and what's not, if you want something to generate a QR code for you, if you're using something like a blink tree, this is all built in. And it's a one time fee right now. Now, depending on when you listen to this, I went over their website. And their smallest plan once this goes off of app Sumo is $47 a month. Now I should also mention another key feature is it is GDPR compliant. So

if you're in the UK, and you're worried about privacy, you can actually have it do a pop up and have people comply that yes, we know this is on the website. So I just was like, I gotta tell everyone who listens to web tools radio about it. And I'll have links out in the show notes, web tools radio.com/ aid. And that'll take you right to this particular episode. Of course, if you're listening to this on your phone, you can swipe up or down or left to right. It's there in the description. Thanks so much for listening to web tools, radio, if you know somebody who would appreciate that. Or if you go i Oh, man, they're going to be so happy when they go Dude, I'm so happy you told me about switchy and Dobby growing my audience so your friends will think you're cool, and I get a bigger audience. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Dave Jackson from the School of podcasting.com. We'll see you again real soon with another episode of web tools radio