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

There are sites where you can paste a long, ugly URL into a form,
and the site will give you a much shorter URL to use in your
emails, newsletters and promotions.

There are also scripts that you can install on your server, that
allow you to generate shortened URLs, which is what I
prefer, due to the great control it gives you.

In case you are not using the tiny urls, you’re probably losing
a 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 such as Twitter, where each
of your posts is limited to a mere 140 characters.

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• They look more professional than long, unwieldy affiliate
URLs (especially if they have your domain name in them).
Longer URLs can wrap to two lines in your emails, forcing
many readers to copy and paste the pieces of the link before
they can visit a recommended page. Many won’t jump though
that hoop!

• They allow 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 where you have placed that link and
manually swapping them out. This comes in handy if you are
promoting a particular product, and due to whatever reason,
you decide to promote a different product in the same
category.

There are also times 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 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 Internet each time that they are
read (which most of MY customers don’t like) allow you to change
links inside the ebook after it’s distributed.

There are literally dozens of third-party link shortening
services. I’ve used several of them and they work great except
that they control YOUR links. If they get any complaints, or
simply decide 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
ability to have more than a handful of URLs on their platform.
Some charge you extra if you generate more than a few thousand
clicks – they penalize you for being successful.

If you stop paying for these premium services, they often shut
off all of your links INSTANTLY. Once you have all those links
floating around cyberspace (in ebooks, articles, ads, 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.

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I recently looked at one service that had the audacity to charge
$97 per month to allow you to „white label“ their third-party
service, and use your domain name with their service. Using
your domain name within shortened links is a great idea
because it brands you and your domain. If properly configured, it
also passes along „link love“ from the search engines, and
helps you to rank higher for your keywords.

However, paying a monthly fee is unnecessary, and therefore
wasteful. Instead invest that money in another area of growing
your business.

Here’s the better solution that I use…

I’ve installed an inexpensive link shortening script, that works
just like those third-party hosted shorteners, on my OWN server.
I paid less than $40 for this script AND I own it and can use it
forever, on as many of my own domains as I want to
(in-accordance-with the terms of their license).

title="Forget Expensive PPC Advertising - There is an Alternative!" border="0"/>

Think about it. If you’re using one of those services that cost
just $30 per month, you’ll save $360 per year using the solution
that I use. You’ll save $1164 per year compared to that company
charging $97 per month!

Heck, I could even offer MY OWN URL shortening service to my
customers if I wanted to, using this same under $40 script. I
don’t because spammers love these services, and would harm my
brand and the reputation of my domain name.

That’s another reason why you don’t want to use a third party
hosted URL shortening service. Many ISP’s get so many complaints
about emails containing URLs from some of these services, that
they filter against emails containing some of their domain names.
It does no good to build a list of 50,000 if only 20% of your
email gets through because of a poor decision that you made.
You’re missing 80% of potential sales.

If you are the only one sending out from the domain name that
your URL shortening script resides on, and you market ethically,
you should not have this problem of being blocked by spam
filters.

I’ve just shared with you some things that most marketers using
URL shortening services don’t really give much thought. Now that
you understand these things, you can set up links that will work
for you long-term, brand you and your domains, cost you very
little, and provide all of the benefits that led many marketers
to use those third-party hosted solutions in the first place. The
big difference will be that you’ll be in charge of your links
instead of being a hostage to those third party URL shortening
services.

About The Author
Willie Crawford is an Internet marketing consultant and super affiliate who has been
marketing goods and services over the Internet for over 13 years. To closely track his
promotional efforts and to cloak ugly affiliate links he recommends using a url shortening
script hosted on you own domain. Willie’s favorite script is at:
YourOwnShortUrl.com

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