Nudge Text or the Nudge is such a fun company. In their words, in select cities they “...do the planning for you, then text you exactly what you need to do things,” and they have stayed true to their mission even during the pandemic.
If you live in Austin, San Francisco, Seattles, or New York City, I highly recommend you subscribe.
TLDR: The Nudge rapidly made a multi-page mobile friendly ‘website’ with amazon affiliate links by publishing a stylized Google Sheet
Timeline:
- They asked for the book recommendations on Tuesday via SMS
- They published the site and send it out via SMS less than two days later
I can’t think of any other example of a business launching a 5-page mobile-friendly website in under 2 days while gathering real-time content over SMS… Truly remarkable.
Definitely not made for desktop:
They could have fixed this via routing their short domain. Essentially, the short url goes to a landing page that takes in the device and operating system of the user and then routes to the final destination based on mobile or desktop.
They optimized the url path for easy tracking:
Short url in message: https://ndge.me/bookpicksatx/S2ttTr
Short domain / City and Category / Unique ID (6 chars)
💡Quick Tip: To save on texting costs, which are usually per message and dependent on the number of characters, The Nudge could shorten via the Unique ID → redirect to the longer categorized URL (for analytics) → then go to the final destination (in this case the published Google Sheet)
The book links (if copied) in the published Spreadsheet look like this:
When clicked redirects to:
Which redirects to the final destination here:
Very smart way to make affiliate income in case any of Nudge’s subscribers make purchases off of Amazon.
💡 Quick Tip: I like to use https://wheregoes.com/retracer.php to trace where links open up to. It’s a great way to see the tools that businesses are using behind the scenes.
💡Quick Tip: if you’re logged into Google Drive, type sheets.new into your browser to open up a fresh Google Sheet
Time to figure out the dimensions of this Google Sheet… The old fashioned way…
💡 Quick Tip: On a Mac use Command-Shift-3 to take a screenshot of your entire desktop
Here’s my published version!
💡 Quick Tip: Make sure you are logged into Google Drive and click this link if you’d like to copy this spreadsheet design for your own purposes
I also added a sheet to show you how to bulk add nested hyperlinks directly inside Google Sheets. All you need is the url you want to have nested and the label of the link
The next step in the process is to dynamically shorten the google sheet URL for all of the subscribers you want to send it to and to make sure that your shortener changes the metadata of the URL so that it opens up with your branding inside their messages. How to do that quickly and easily is enough for a whole other post though so I’ll leave it at that.
