5 Quick Tips About Shorten Links

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

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

You will discover three important reasons I suggest bloggers and online company owners shorten their links.

They make it simpler to share on social networks.

Especially on Twitter, in which you only have 140 characters to share your thoughts, every character counts! A long URL can take up half of your space if you’re not careful. By shortening the link you give yourself more room to “talk” and also 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 may be. Don’t 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 so that you get credit for the sales you refer to a service or product.

With a regular affiliate link, you might have something like somedomain ? yourcodehere that’s easy for someone to just go direct to the domain. Worse however, 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 conveniently eliminating your affiliate code. Bear in mind, they may still switch out the link completely, but why make it easy for them?

Another circumstance that shortened links you can control are good for is in case you are promoting affiliate products as well as your recommendation changes. If you have a link of yourdomain / bestwebhost and today you are promoting SuperHost123, you may 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 same short link still works.

You can track your links to see what is getting clicked.

Using some link shorteners provides you with a very easy way to track how many clicks your links are getting. With HootSuite’s link shortner, if you choose ow.ly to shorten the link with, you can simply access statistics on how often times your link was clicked and when. Using the GoCodes plugin for WordPress also permits you to find out how often times your links happen to be clicked.