Are you using a link shortener yet for your web page links and affiliate links? In any other case, you should be! And it is easy to do.

You may choose to make use of a web-based link shortener like TinyURL, Bit.ly or ShortURL. Or, you may install the GoCodes plugin for WordPress or possibly a free script like Shorty on your own domain and stay in control of your affiliate links. Using your own domain as the base for your short links lets you build links to your web site, build your brand, and be in control of where the links are pointing to.

You’ll find three important reasons I suggest bloggers and online company owners shorten their links.

They make it easier to share on social networks.

Especially on Twitter, where you only have 140 characters to share your thoughts, every character counts! A long URL shortener will take up half of your space if you aren’t careful. By shortening the link you give yourself more room to “talk” and make it easier for others to retweet your tweet and share it with their followers.

Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as other social networks also have limits on how many characters long each of your status updates can be. Do not waste your space with long URLs.

They allow you to protect your affiliate links and update as needed.

If you promote affiliate products, you want to protect your affiliate links to ensure that you get credit for the sales you refer to a product.

With a regular affiliate link, you might have something like somedomain ? yourcodehere that is easy for somebody to just go direct to the domain. Worse still, unscrupulous marketers may grab your tweet or status update from a social network and share it – but with their code in place of yours! Using a shortened link prevents someone from quickly eliminating your affiliate code. Bear in mind, also they can still switch out the link completely, but why make it easy for them?

Another circumstance that shortened links you may control are good for is for anybody who is promoting affiliate products as well as your recommendation changes. Should you have a link of yourdomain / bestwebhost and today you are promoting SuperHost123, you can use your shortened link to point there. If SuperHost123 goes out of business or you find a better option at BestHost789 you can easily change your link to point to your new recommendation–and the exact same short link still works.

You can track your links to view what’s getting clicked.

Using some link shorteners provides you with a simple way to track how many clicks your links are getting. With HootSuite’s link shortner, if you choose ow.ly to shorten with, you can readily access statistics on how many times your link was clicked and when. Using the GoCodes plugin for WordPress also permits you to see how many times your links are already clicked.