Why You Should Use Redirection

David H. Lawrence XVII April 3, 2018

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Hey, there!

You: “Um, what’s with the capital ‘R’ in the word ‘Redirection’ in the title of this post, David?”

Me: “I’m glad you noticed. And it’s capitalized because it’s really important. It can mean the difference between someone booking you for a VO job, or them booking someone else.”

You: “Wow. That does sound important.”

Me: “I know. Here’s why…”

You’ve got a WordPress site. It’s going great.

Imagine linking, all over the web, on your own web page, on your About Me’s on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, etc, to your demos or profile page over on Voice123. That Voice123 link is now everywhere.

Then, one day, you wake up, and you find that no one can find your demos. Or profile. Because Voice123 decided to change the format of their links, or, perish the thought, they go out of business or change their name or who knows what.

Now, all of your links don’t work. And you have to hunt them all down and change them, one by one, with no guarantee you’ll ever find them all.

And for sure, someone is going to want to hear your demos, not be able to find them, and end up booking someone else instead.

No one wants that, right?

No, you don’t.

So, plan for disaster, and use something called Redirection.

If you use WordPress, the Redirection plugin makes the problem of broken links manageable. Imagine, if you will, a link that YOU create, on YOUR site, that remains constant, and that, in turn, redirects people who click on it to the real link of your choosing – the actual location of your demo, as an example. You can make your created link something easy to remember, like:

http://yourdomain.com/commercial-demo

…and then have it point to whatever the actual location is for your demo’s MP3 file. The Redirection plugin makes that a snap. Then, use that created link everywhere instead of the actual URL.

And then, should the actual URL of your demo, or target link, have to ever change, you can just update the Redirection plugin’s settings, and everywhere that your created link exists, they will all instantly point to the new, updated target link. Let Voice123 wreak havoc with where they put your demos – you just calmly update your Redirection target link, and all will be well with the universe.

And, actually, it doesn’t just apply to links to your demos on Voice123.com. Because any website can change their URLs at a moment’s notice. And that’s a lesson that was brought home to me recently.

I started to get a bunch of emails from 60 Second readers, telling me that the link I’d published in one of my posts, the one that let you vote for VO2GoGo in the BACKSTAGE Readers’ Choice Awards, was giving them a “This survey has been closed” message.

Turns out that overnight, BackStage changed their voting page URL. And that meant that all of the newsletters that went out yesterday no longer have a working link in them.

Well, from now on, I’ll be able to fix that, in this and all future posts, just in case they get “creative” again. All I did was create a Redirection link on the VO2GoGo.com website, and chose the current working link at Backstage as the target.

Works like a charm. For now.

(And we won, by the way.)

But, if BACKSTAGE changes the URL again, all I have to do is change the target URL that my created URL points to, and all will still flow smoothly.

So, for the links that really matter, that are off your site and out of your control, use a Redirection plug in, or, have your web designer create redirection links that you can change on the fly.

Hope this helps.

David

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Why You Should Use Redirection

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