Sniply Changes How You Share—While Marketing Your Business

When a person first hears about Sniply and what it does, the reaction falls into one of three camps: disbelief, wonder, or suspicion.

The premise is simple:

Instead of using the direct link to content when you share it, you create a Sniply link that sends your visitor to the destination through Sniply.
When the visitor arrives at the destination—whether it’s Time magazine’s website or a WordPress blog—they will see a banner for your website, product, or service on that website.

It really doesn’t matter which site it is (with a few exceptions). Whether it’s Rolling Stone or The New York Times, the visitor will see your ad on it.

Such a wild concept provokes all sorts of questions about its legitimacy and effectiveness, so let’s dive in and get to the bottom of this strange thing called Sniply.

How Sniply Works

There are a few ways to create Sniply links. You must first visit their website and create an account (free account allows you up to 1000 clicks per month), where you can see how Sniply works and create your message.
Once you’ve created your account, you have the option to install a browser extension. Let’s say you’re using Google Chrome.
First, you find an external link (i.e., not from your own website) that you want to share with your social media fans and followers. From that page, you click on the blue Sniply button in the Chrome toolbar or visit your Sniply dashboard to drop the link and create your Sniply.
If you’re using the Chrome extension, a box pops up to create a customized banner or form that will appear on this page. You create a call to action and a link for your CTA. It then gives you a special shortened Sniply link that you will use when you share the site’s content.
The Sniply is easily modified for a wide variety of purposes. If you have a paid account, you can even create a survey question with a form for people to enter their answer to a question.
The latest Sniply we created was from Entrepreneur.com, and you can view it here. Note how our message and branding are along the bottom of the page.

Ideas for Using Sniply

If you create Sniply links from YouTube videos, it will play the YouTube video, and then return the visitor to your site when the video is finished.

You can create permanent Sniply links for all outbound links on your website so no matter where someone goes when they leave your site, a call-to-action follows them.

It also does A/B testing so you can test your color buttons or your copywriting messages (requires a paid account), and it uses honest SEO, which means, using “canonical headers,” the search engines will always credit the original site to which you’re linking, not your Sniply url.

Sniply defends their technology this way:

Without Sniply, distributors are expected to distribute content for free, with no benefits to the distributors whatsoever. Imagine a company with a team of volunteer salespeople—that’s what the industry has been like for a long time. Sniply provides the opportunity for distributors to be rewarded for their work, which leads to more sharing and a healthier ecosystem overall.

Of course, any powerful tool can be misused for evil purposes. Theoretically, a less-than-virtuous marketer could intentionally create their banner to look like it belongs to the site that they’re targeting, and then pull a bait and switch on the visitor.

Don’t do that.

Frankly, there’s no reason to do it. Sniply already works really well when used the way its creators intended.

Why Wouldn’t You Try This New Approach?

Sniply isn’t some underground tool that only shady marketers use. Entrepreneur.com loves it too. If you use it responsibly, there’s no reason you shouldn’t love it too.