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 your own 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.

- They look more professional than long, unwieldy affiliate urls (especially if they have your own 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! Short Link

- 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 customer 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.