First I would like to thank the folks at Bit.ly for letting me try this beta service. I guess if you sign up for it and wait a week or so you will probably get to preview it too.

I am very impressed with the beta service. I set it up from soup to nuts in about 15 minutes total in between a very busy day at work and meetings.

I signed in to the service via the email link from Bit.ly notifying me that I’ve been granted access. Here’s what you’ll see at Bit.ly Pro main page. Go to Settings and you’ll start the 3-steps process.

1. You’ll be asked to enter the custom domain. I don’t have one and after “binging” it, I decided to buy one from Name.com because my blog host bluehost.com doesn’t sell “.me” domain. I chose http://fupay.me as my host name. If you are a movie buff,  you can probably guess where I get the idea.

2. After I entered the custom host name, the instruction asked me to set the Bitly Pro IP address given to me into fupay.me DNS A record. I login to http://name.com to set it up, a minute later it’s done. Bit.ly asked me to wait while they have it set up. (Probably waiting for the host name to go live).

3. Next I enter the URL of this blog to set up the Dashboard. It’ll ask you to put a meta tag on  your site. Piece of cake, the theme I use have a option section to enter meta tag, I didn’t even have to edit any PHP file.

Before I left the office, I tested it and it’s already working! I didn’t make any changes to my TweetDeck setting since I am using the same account. TweetDeck started to use http://fupay.me as my shortener. Bravo Bit.ly. This professional service might be the way to make some money at scale now that Twitter decided to give you the finger by making their own URL shortener.

Here’s the Dashboard in case you are curious:

EAVB_ASLRNDAZQD