Hello? Anybody out there with the blue bird?

Twitter can drive people to websites. Just put a URL in your tweet and there they go.

Hypothetically.

Finding out whether or not they went is another matter.

If it’s your website you’re driving them to, you could use Google analytics to find out if your tweets bump your traffic up. (What? You don’t have Google analytics installed? It just takes pasting a little code into one of your pages and you really can’t afford to be without them. Go now. I beg you.)

But it takes 24 hours to get analytics data–and you can’t tell exactly when someone visited. So that alone won’t  help you know how effective your tweet was about your fabulous new show/sale/commission/medium/press coverage.

BudURL to the rescue. This nifty free service does two things at once:

1. It converts long URLs to short ones that take up fewer characters

2. It also tracks hits–and continuously updates them.

Post your tweet, then go back to your BudURL account page. Watch, in real time, as people hit the URL you posted.

This is pretty useful for a couple of reasons. You can…

re-tweet the same thing a couple of times and find out if you get the same number of hits. If so, then it makes sense to periodically post the BudURL to get the most exposure.

You can also edit your tweet to see if you can increase the number of hits. Introduce the URL differently three or four times and see what gets the best response rate.

This little tool will be your new best budURLdie.

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When it comes to even more smARTness to move your art career forward, nothing’s better than those 7-days of the smARTist Telesummit 2009 where the artists who attended learned specific ways to succeed even in today’s challenging markets. And now you can too!