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

There are actually sites the place you can paste a long, ugly URL into a form, as well as the site will give you a much shorter URL to use within your emails, newsletters and promotions.

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

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

They enable you to conserve space when posting to micro- blogging platforms such as Twitter, where each of your posts is restricted 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 2 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 make it possible for 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 in which you have placed that link and manually swapping them out. This comes in handy in the event that you are promoting a particular product, and due to whatever reason, you elect to promote an alternative product in the same category.

There are also 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, please click the up coming document an edit button, change the destination link, and all of your links scattered across cyberspace now STILL point to in which you want them to.

This 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 internet each time that they may be read (which most of MY customer do not like) enable you to change links inside the eBook after it’s distributed.

There are actually literally dozens of independent party link shortening services. I’ve used several of them and they work great except that they control YOUR links. Whenever they get any complaints, or simply choose to change their business model, they could kill off all of your links instantly.

Premium, independent party URL shortening services also hold you hostage. They charge you a monthly fee for extras, or for the ability to have more than a handful of urls on their 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 for these premium services, they often shut off all your links INSTANTLY. When you have all those links floating around cyberspace (in ebooks, articles, ads, 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.