One of the most useful tools to come along lately for online marketers is URL shorteners.

You will find sites where 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.

Additionally, there are scripts that one can install on your server, that make it possible for 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 make it possible for 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 should 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 will not jump although 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 case you are promoting a particular product, and due to whatever reason, you elect to promote a different 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 right 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 necessary for ebooks, because once an eBook is in your customers’ hands you cannot update those links in the majority of cases. Only ebooks that connect to the internet each time that they’re read (which most of MY customer do not like) allow you to change links within the eBook after it’s distributed.

There are 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 click the following post decide to change their business model, they could kill off all your links instantly.

Premium, independent 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 few thousand clicks – they penalize you for being successful.

If you stop paying of such premium services, they frequently 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.