One of the most useful tools to come along recently for online marketers is free URL shortener service shorteners.

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

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

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

They permit you to conserve space when posting to micro- blogging platforms for example Twitter, where each of your posts is limited to 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 within your emails, forcing many readers to copy and paste the pieces of the link before they can visit a recommended page. Many will not jump though that hoop!

They make it possible for 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 because of whatever reason, you decide to promote an alternative product in the same category.

Additionally there are 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 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’t update those links in most cases. Only ebooks that connect to the net each time that they are read (which most of MY customer do not like) allow you to change links in 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. If they get any complaints, or simply decide 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 ability to have more than a handful of urls on their platform. Some charge you extra if you generate more than several thousand clicks – they penalize you for being successful.

If you stop paying for these premium services, they frequently shut off all your links INSTANTLY. Once you have all those links floating around cyberspace (in ebooks, articles, ads, press releases, ezine editorials, etc.) you don’t want to just kill them off, so you’re STUCK often paying hefty fees, month after month.