Among shorten the link most useful tools to come along lately for online marketers is URL shorteners.

You’ll find sites in which you can paste a long, ugly URL into a form, and the site will give you a much shorter URL to use within your emails, newsletters and promotions.

There’s also scripts you could install on your server, that make it possible for you to generate your own shortened urls, which is exactly what I prefer, as a result of the great control it provides you with.

In-case you are not using the tiny urls, you are probably losing a great deal of sales and traffic. The advantages of using shortened urls typically include:

They allow you to conserve space when posting to micro- blogging platforms such as Twitter, where each of your posts is limited to a mere 140 characters.

They look more professional than long, unwieldy affiliate urls (especially whenever they have your own domain name in them). Longer urls can wrap to two lines within your emails, forcing many readers to copy and paste the pieces of the link before also they can visit a recommended page. Many won’t jump though that hoop!

They allow you to log in to a control panel and change where a particular link sends traffic without you having to track down all of the places where you have placed that link and manually swapping them out. This comes in handy in case you are promoting a particular product, and due to what ever reason, you choose to promote an alternative product in the same category.

Additionally there are times when affiliate programs change the software that power things, forcing you to change your affiliate links for a given product. If you use the proper URL shortener, you would merely need to log in to your control panel, click an edit button, change the destination link, and all of your links scattered across cyberspace now STILL point to where you want them to.

This really is required for ebooks, because once an eBook is within your customers’ hands you can not update those links in the majority of cases. Only ebooks that connect to the web each time that they are read (which most of MY customer don’t like) enable you to change links inside the eBook after it’s distributed.

You’ll find literally lots of third-party link shortening services. I have used several of them and they work great except that they control YOUR links. Whenever they get any complaints, or simply opt to change their business model, they could kill off all of your links instantly.

Premium, third-party URL shortening services also hold you hostage. They charge you a monthly fee for extras, or for the capability to have more than a handful of urls on their platform. Some charge you extra if you generate more than a few thousand clicks – they penalize you for being successful.

If you stop paying of these premium services, they often shut off all of your links INSTANTLY. Once you have all those links floating around cyberspace (in ebooks, articles, advertisements, press releases, ezine editorials, etc.) you do not want to just kill them off, so you are STUCK often paying hefty fees, month after month.