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

You may choose to make use of 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 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 can find three important reasons I suggest bloggers and online business owners shorten link their links.

They make it easier to share on social networks.

Especially on Twitter, in which you only have 140 characters to talk about your thoughts, every character counts! A long URL takes up half of your space if you aren’t careful. By shortening the link you give yourself more room to “talk” and additionally make it easier for others to retweet your tweet and share it with their followers.

Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as other social networks in addition have limits on how many characters long each of your status updates may be. Don’t waste your space with long URLs.

They make it possible for you to protect your affiliate links and update as needed.

If you promote affiliate products, you want to protect your affiliate links to ensure that you get credit for the sales you refer to a merchandise.

With a regular affiliate link, you could have something like somedomain ? yourcodehere that’s easy for someone to just go direct to the domain. Worse yet, 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 easily eliminating your affiliate code. Keep in mind, they can 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 when you are promoting affiliate products and your recommendation changes. Should you have a link of yourdomain / bestwebhost and today you’re promoting SuperHost123, you may use your shortened link to point there. If SuperHost123 goes out of business or you locate 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 an easy way to track how many clicks your links are getting. With HootSuite’s link shortner, if you choose ow.ly to shorten with, you can simply access statistics on how often 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.