3 very important reasons why you should use a link shortener

Are you using a link shortener for your website links and affiliate links? If not, you should be! And it is easy to do.

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

There are three important reasons why I suggest bloggers and online business owners shorten their links.

1. They make it easy to share on social networks.

Especially on Twitter where you only have 140 characters to share your thoughts, every character counts! A long URL can take up half your space if you’re not careful. By shortening the link, it gives you more space to “talk” and also makes it easier for others to retweet your tweet and share it with their followers.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks also have limits on how many characters each of your status updates can have. Don’t waste your space with long URLs.

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

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

With a regular affiliate link, you might have something like www.somedomain.com/?yourcodehere it’s easy for someone to go straight to the domain. Worse still, unscrupulous marketers can take your tweet or status update from a social network and share it – but with your code instead of theirs! Using a shortened link prevents someone from easily deleting your affiliate code. Of course, they can still change the link completely, but why give it to them?

Another circumstance that short links you can control are good for is if you are promoting affiliate products and your recommendation changes. If you have a link of www.yourdomain.com/bestwebhost and today you are promoting SuperHost123, you can use your short link to target there. If SuperHost123 closes or finds a better option on BestHost789, you can easily change its link to point to your new recommendation, and the same short link still works.

3. You can crawl your links to see what gets clicked.

Using some link shorteners gives you an easy way to keep track of the number of clicks your links receive. With HootSuite’s link shortener, if you choose to shorten with ow.ly, you can easily access statistics on how many times your link was clicked and when. Using the GoCodes plugin for WordPress also allows you to see how many times your links have been clicked.