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

You may choose to employ a web-based link shortener like TinyURL, Bit.ly or ShortURL. Or, you may install the GoCodes plugin for WordPress or possibly a free URL shortener service 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 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 people shorten their links.

They make it simpler to share on social networks.

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

Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks also have limits on how many characters long each of your status updates may be. Do not 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 so that you get credit for the sales you refer to a products or services.

With a regular affiliate link, you might have something like somedomain ? yourcodehere that is easy for someone to just go direct to the domain. Worse nonetheless, 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 effortlessly eliminating your affiliate code. Simply, 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 if you are promoting affiliate products and also your recommendation changes. If you have a link of yourdomain / bestwebhost and today you are promoting SuperHost123, you can use your shortened link to point there. If SuperHost123 goes out of business or you find a better option at BestHost789 you can simply change your link to point to your new recommendation–and the same short link still works.

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

Using some link shorteners gives you 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 enables you to find out how many times your links happen to be clicked.