When it comes to Social Media, e-mails and Offline Publication of links, URL shorteners play a very vital role. The URL looks clean, you can also track the clicks on the URLs and easy for someone to visit a web page mentioned in a magazine, book or newspaper article.

Bitly.com is one of the most accepted URL Shorteners. URLs shorten with it, start with bit.ly followed by a few characters. But did you know that bitly also allows you to have your own custom domain? You have to register your short domain name and use it with bitly system for free.

Having your own customized short URL helps in branding. I had this short domain from a while – techblik.com and, I am using it for URL shortening with bitly. All the links that I share on social media and email will be something like this: https://techblik.com/VBjb97K

If someone manually types in techblik.com in the browser Address bar, it can be redirected to a URL of my choice. By default, it redirects to bitly.com but you can change it in the settings. You are not able to have any content or webpage on this domain. The domain name should be dedicated to URL shortening only.

Whenever I am logged into my bitly account, the URLs I try to shorten would be techblik.com URLs by default.

How to Setup a Custom Domain in Bitly

Sign up for a free account in bitly.com.

Go to Settings -> Advanced.

In the Custom Short Domain section, select Personal and enter your short domain. You have to change the NameServer records of your domain name to make it work with bitly.com.

Where to Get Nice Short Domains?

Domainr.com is a domain name service with special focus on short domains names. You can also try some domain hacks with the top level domain. Not many of us would not be lucky as enough to have a name that has the last 2 or 3 characters which is also a TLD.

If you do not get the domain you want and are ready to pay a premium to get a nice domain name, head to sedo.com or buydomains.com or Bigrock.in. They sell plenty of short premium domains.