One of the most useful tools to come along in recent times for online marketers is URL shorteners.
You can find sites the place you can paste a long, ugly URL into a form, and the site will give you a much shorter URL to use within your emails, newsletters and promotions.
There are also scripts that you may install on your server, that permit you to generate your own shortened urls, which is what I prefer, due to the great control it provides you with.
In-case you are not using the tiny urls, you’re probably losing a whole lot of sales and traffic. The benefits of using shortened urls typically include:
They allow you to conserve space when posting to micro- blogging platforms for example Twitter, where each of your posts is limited by a mere 140 characters.
They look more professional than long, unwieldy affiliate urls (especially whenever 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 won’t jump although that hoop!
They permit 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 the place you have placed that link and manually swapping them out. This comes in handy in case you are promoting a particular product, and as a result of whatever reason, you opt to promote another product in the same category.
There are also 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 the place you want them to.
This is essential for ebooks, because once an eBook is in your customers’ hands you can’t update those links in most cases. Only ebooks that connect to the web each time that they are read (which most of MY customer don’t like) permit you to change links within the eBook after it’s distributed.
You will find literally lots of independent party link shortening services. I have used several of them and they work great except that they control YOUR links. Whenever they get any complaints, or simply click the next website choose to change their business model, they could kill off all your links instantly.
Premium, third-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 your links INSTANTLY. When you have all those links floating around cyberspace (in ebooks, articles, advertisements, 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.