My jaw dropped a couple of weeks ago when I came upon a Youtube clip. To make money, he purchased the Php code of a URL shortener provider and hosted it on his private website. So I opted to give it a go and see whether I could truly generate money by offering a URL shortening service or not. Nevertheless, my main issue was that I didn’t want to fork out $30 for the script and other resources. As a result, I began looking for APIs that’d enable me to shorten an infinite number of URLs for no fee or for little fee at all.
Bitly and Rebrandly both set restrictions on the number of URLs you could shorten using their APIs, and if you exceeded the restriction, you would be penalized. In order to make the project as low-cost as feasible, this didn’t pan out for me. One of the best websites I found after doing further investigation was cuttly, which enables users to not only abbreviate as many links for free but also keeps a record of their URLs and displays their statistics. This feature comes in handy if you want to know how many clicks your URL received.
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Creating the Bot
After deciding to go with the cuttly API, the next challenge I faced was figuring out how to promote my service. Which of these three—a website, a smartphone app, or a social networking bot—should I build first? For me, the solution that worked best was to program a bot that could communicate through Telegram. For ones who’ve already built a number of complicated Telegram bots in the past, this task would prove quite simple. Since it is not the purpose of this blog, I will not be explaining how the bot’s scripts work. However, I’ll describe the Python libraries I employed for anyone who is keen to know more:
- requests (to use Cuttly)
- redis (to gain entry to Redis )
- python-telegram-bot ( to gain entry to Telegram)
“Then how do you make money ?”
To address your query, each bot user is entitled to 10 free URL shortenings. The user is prompted to update their membership when they approach the limit. The lifetime membership to the website costs only $1, which is a very affordable price for a product of this caliber An payment from Stripe is delivered to the customer via Telegram when they tap on the “Upgrade ” link in the bot (one of the best Telegram features!). This is how it’s done.
Finding Client
In the event that I have a service that works beautifully and is waiting to be utilized, how can I encourage others to use it? In case you lack the advertising know-how and financial resources to publicize my business. So I decided to use the old-fashioned approach of adverts: placing advertisements on Reddit, Facebook, and not to mention, Telegram group chats.
I got loads of visitors in the first seven days. I had a feeling this idea was doomed from the start. Things began to shift in the second week. Every hour, I had around five new users sign up for the bot since it was so popular. My hunch is that the bot’s popularity grew organically as early users passed it along to their social networks. Newbies were brought on board by existing users.
With this approach, one can easily earn about $250 each month with a Telegram bot. Nothing but passive income!
