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 decide to employ a web-based link shortener like TinyURL, Bit.ly or ShortURL. Or, you may 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 site, build your brand, and be in control of where the links are pointing to.

There are actually three important reasons I suggest bloggers and online owners shorten their links.

They make it simpler to share on social networks.

Especially on Twitter, where you only have 140 characters to share your thoughts, every character counts! A long URL may take 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 in addition have limits on how many characters long each of your status updates can be. Don’t waste your space with long URLs.

They allow 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 make reference to a service or product.

With a regular affiliate link, you might have something like somedomain ? yourcodehere that’s easy for someone to just go direct to the domain. Worse still, 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 conveniently eliminating your affiliate code. Keep in mind, they may 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 for anybody who is promoting affiliate products as well as your recommendation changes. Should you have a link of yourdomain / bestwebhost and today you’re 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 exact same short link still works.

You can track your links to determine what’s 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 easily access statistics on how often times your link was clicked and when. Using the GoCodes plugin for WordPress also permits you to see how often times your links have been clicked.