One of the most useful tools to come along within the last few years for online marketers is URL shorteners.

You will find sites where you can paste a long, ugly Free Url Shorten in to a form, and also the site will provide you with a much shorter URL to use in your emails, newsletters and promotions.

Additionally there are scripts that one can install on your server, that allow you to generate your own shortened urls, which is what I prefer, due to the good control it provides you with.

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

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

They look more professional than long, unwieldy affiliate urls (especially if they have your own domain name in them). Longer urls can wrap to two lines in 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 even though that hoop!

They permit you to log into 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 if you’re promoting a particular product, and because of whatever reason, you decide to promote a different product within the same category.

There’s also occasions when affiliate programs change the software that power things, forcing you to change your affiliate links for a given product. If you use the correct 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 the place you want them to.

This really is essential for ebooks, because once an eBook is within your customers’ hands you cannot update those links for most cases. Only ebooks that connect to the web each time that they can be read (which most of MY customer do not like) make it possible for you to change links inside the eBook after it’s distributed.

You’ll find literally dozens of third-party link shortening services. I’ve used several of them and they work great except that they control YOUR links. If 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 own platform. Some charge you extra if you generate more than a couple of thousand clicks – they penalize you for being successful.

If you stop paying of such premium services, they often shut off all of your links INSTANTLY. When 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’re STUCK often paying hefty fees, month after month.