Last week, Lao Zhou asked me: "Gained 300 followers on my WeChat Official Account, only 2 paid."
Lao Zhou has been doing career coaching for half a year. He's posting daily on WeChat Official Account, Video Account, and Xiaohongshu — 3 posts a day. But he has zero clue which post actually moved someone to pay.
I hit this same wall in 2023. I was running online courses, posted 20+ Xiaohongshu notes, the backend numbers looked great, then I checked conversion rate — brutal. Later it clicked: I was tracking vanity metrics, not real ones.
How did Zohran's campaign team do it?
Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoral primary this year. His team pulled off something unsexy: they used dedicated short links to track every single donation back to the creator, platform, and exact copy that drove it.
Example: different TikTok creators pushing for him each got links like zohran.fyi/creator-a, zohran.fyi/creator-b. When donations came in, the team knew next day who to pay out, which channel to kill, which copy to amplify.
As a one-person company or personal brand, we can 100% steal this play — no website needed, no coding.
Three free tools cover it:
- Bitly: OG short-link tool, free tier gives 10 links/month
- Short.io: 1000 free links, shows click source and geo
- utm.io: generates links with UTM parameters (for those already on Google Analytics)
How much to copy this today?
- Money: $0. Bitly free tier is enough to start.
- Time: 30 minutes to sign up + generate your first short link.
- Tech barrier: If you can copy-paste, you're good. UTM parameters in plain English — they're little tags you tack onto the end of a link, like
?utm_source=xiaohongshu, so your backend can tell which channel sent the visitor. - First step: Go to Bitly.com, sign up with Google in seconds, click "Create" top-left, paste the link you want to share, hit Create, copy the short link out.
I got stuck here too — after generating my first short link, I thought I was done, then forgot to actually put it in the post. Realized a week later: I'd buried the link in tiny text at the bottom, nobody clicked. Lesson: put the link where the reader is hooked, not at the end where it's convenient for you.
Which stage are you at?
If you're just starting out (0 customers): Skip this for now. What you need is to ship stuff and get feedback. Once you've posted 20+ pieces and people start asking "how do I pay?" — that's when short links earn their keep.
If you have 1-2 customers: Start now. One dedicated short link per channel. Post for a week, then check the dashboard — which channel gets clicks AND conversions, put 80% of your energy there. I was running 5 channels at once, then found 80% of customers came from just one. The rest was noise.
If you're scaling (5+ customers/month): Upgrade to Short.io paid ($19/mo+) or build your own UTM template for anyone on your team. Tag every post, do an Excel review at month-end. Short links aren't just about data — they're the scalpel that cuts your wasted effort.
This tool isn't for everyone — if all your customers come from friend referrals, serve those people well first. Short links can wait.