If you’re an avid Twitter user like me, then you’re WELL aware of the 140 character limit per tweet. If you’re sharing a link that you think your followers should read, the site’s url could quite possibly leave you NO ROOM to add your “Flash and Flare” to the tweet.

To combat this, most sites have sharing buttons that use a short url service that shrinks the full url down to a couple of characters for easier sharing and more space to add your $0.2 cents in the tweet. That’s where services like Bit.ly and too many others to name come in and offer their shortening services for free in most cases.

These sites add their own shortening characters (http://Custom.Url/suffix), but what if you want your own? A site I found was Domai.nr and it’s a straightforward site that helps you find a short url that can be added to any and ALL of your links for easy recognition and brand awareness.

Now I’m sure there are plenty of ways that you can achieve this, but since this is my site, I’m going to share how I found, registered, and setup my short url: techb.ro

Get it? BrothaTech —> techb.ro

Beuller?

Anywayz…

For the better part of two years, I have been using Bit.ly to shorten and share links I find while searching the interwebz. The service is free and lets me connect my Twitter and Facebook accounts for sending tweets and status updates directly to these sites for quicker sharing. Many of the services I use pull from Bit.ly’s API, so I figured I stay with them and add my newly registered short url to their service to keep everything nice and smooth.

But before I get into that, I had to find a short url and register (read: pay for) it. If you’ve searched for an available url in oh, I dunno, the last five years, you should have found out pretty quickly that most of the good url’s (especially the ones I thought were original) are probably already taken.

Side Note: PLEASE REGISTER YOUR “GUBMENT” NAME AS A URL BEFORE IT’S TAKEN TOO! First and last name will do – Dots, underscores, or other special characters need not apply!

So I searched the web and found Domai.nr – a simple site that lets you type in words and spits out results as possible short url’s. In addition to just finding possible url’s, the site also offers suggestions on possible sites (that I am assuming it has partnered up with) where you can register your short url. In my case, techb.ro uses a Romanian suffix (as in the suffix that the country Romania uses), so Domai.nr suggested an international domain search and registration site.

The price was reasonable to me, so I went ahead and coughed up the dough and registered techb.ro. Transferring it over to me was pretty quick and I was ready, no wait, I was itching to start using techb.ro in my tweets, status updates, or anyplace else where I wanted to share links.

…Which brings me back to setting up techb.ro to work with Bit.ly. A while back, I signed up for a free Bit.ly Pro account (just because) unbeknown to me that the free upgrade would come in handy later; particularly, the portion that lets users add a custom short domain name when sharing content. Bit.ly Pro accounts are still free, and offer some additional cool features above and beyond the basic account, so I suggest you jump on that.

In theory, Bit.ly’s process for setting up techb.ro was simple. I had to go back to the domain registrar where techb.ro was set up and make one DNS A Record change. Of course, I was so ready to use techb.ro that I skipped some steps…shout out to Rex Dixon who set me straight.

Once that was done, Bit.ly verified that I added the record to their liking and BOOM! techb.ro was ready to rock and roll. Like I mentioned earlier, a great deal of services I use tie in to Bit.ly’s API, so that means everywhere I share links that use Bit.ly, they will automagically use techb.ro as my short url.

Before: http://bit.ly/12345
After: http://techb.ro/12345

Pretty cool, eh? I’ll be honest, most of my reasoning behind getting my own short url is because it looks cool…and I’m cool, so it seemed like a fit. Additionally, having a short url adds to the brand in BrothaTech that I’m building. Now I’m not a brand specialist, but I assume the more I use techb.ro to share url links, the more people in my social network will also pass along the link to their social network, and so on.

…And that has got to be a good thing. Right?