How to find and set up a custom, short domain name for your social media sharing

 Hi there, I'm excited to share this tip with you today on how to find and set up a custom, short domain name for your social media sharing. Awesome, first off I'd love to start at name dot com, which is a great website for finding and purchasing and then managing domain names. And the first step in this trip would be to find a cool, custom, short domain name that might work for you or your business. 

You can type in the kind of any ideas you might have, it's often great to take your name and shorten it by focusing on any nicknames you might have or taking out the vowels or starting with a certain syllable. So for instance, my name could be, I guess it would start with Kevan Lee and I could shorten it further to Kevan and I could even go all the way down to Kev, which might be a good place to start in searching for some options. So typing it in and hitting Enter for search, these is the results that come up. I like to look here in this section for available new domains, to see what kind of options there might be. And also kind of in the main results section there are some good options here. I'm often looking for a three-character ending to the domain, or a two-character ending. Those seem to be great for keeping the URL nice and short. And the prices here you might see are anything from 20 to 50 dollars for a less expensive option, and the more expensive ones can be in the hundreds also. 

So totally up to you, based on your budget and what you have in mind for the domain. The price listed here will get it for you for the first year, and then you can of course re-up after the first year ends and keep the domain as long as you'd like. So once you choose one and buy one, you can manage it straight through the name dot com dashboard here. And this is what the dashboard looks like. You can access the dashboard by clicking "My Account" or up here on your username. From the dashboard, if you click on the URL that you'd like to manage, it'll take you to the details page, and from this details page, we are going to be interested in the DNS records, which is this link here on the left. And before we change anything here, I might recommend keeping this page open in a new tab while you go over to bit.ly, which is a cool link shortening website that we'll use to get everything set up on the link shortening side. It's a free website, you can sign in or sign up, and this is the main bit.ly dashboard.

 From here you'll go up to the top right corner and click on your username and the settings page. And from the settings page go over to the right and one of the far-right options is "Advanced." And then on the Advanced page, you'll scroll down to the "Branded short domain," which is exactly what we're looking for. And click on this link to activate a branded short domain for personal use. Once you click on that you'll come to this page. And here is where you'll put the domain that you want to use. And click the "Add" button. And you'll also notice that there's some information here. 

So it says "Setting up your DNS," which is exactly what we were doing back at name dot com. So if you can find this IP address here, search the numbers, and then copy that and then hop back over to your name dot com tab. And I've set up already here for my account, but just to quickly show you what I did, you can leave everything the same as is, and the one section that you'll want to edit is the Answer column, and that's where you can paste the IP address that you copied from bit.ly.

 Once you have that in there, click the "Add record" button, and it'll be all set. And then once you come back over to bit.ly you can run a new test to make sure it's working. When it's all working great, back on your Advanced tab, you'll see a cool little green checkmark that says DNS configurations okay and good to go, and it'll show you kind of the custom domain that you've chosen right in here. And just to kind of give you an example of what this will look like, here's a post on the Buffer blog that I will quickly shorten with my new short domain. I'll paste it here into bit.ly. And awesome, there it is. So the current short link that it created was this Kev dot no slash, then the extension there.

 I can make it custom. Anything I'd like, save it, and bit.ly will kind of run with that. So awesome. If you made it this far with us, you're all set up and you're good to go to a custom short domain, you can shorten anything through bit.ly that you'd like, one further step that I'd love to show is how you can set this up in buffer as well. So this is my main Buffer account here. I'm on my content tab, I'll click over to the settings and the link-shortening option. And currently, I have my links set to shorten using buff.ly. I'm going to connect my bit.ly account, it's going to go through this authorization process here, I'll click "Allow." And then when we're back at Buffer we have link shortening all setup, and you'll notice that since we connected with bit.ly it now goes straight to Kev dot Uno shortened link.

 So any link I share through Buffer will now be set up to use the custom short domain that we created. So I hope this tip has been helpful for you, I'd love any feedback on this, or any other tips that you've taken with us. And again, thanks so much for spending a little bit of time with me today, and I look forward to chatting with you all again soon.