First I heard about tinyurl.com. Tinyurl is a great free little tool for shortening long URL links but you couldn’t track results, or click through rates.

Then a friend told me about Bit.ly  or Bitly.com

Here’s a screen shot of the main page:

Why Bit.ly Rocks:

1. It’s Free.

2. You can see what people are interested in . . . and what they’re not

3. You can even split test it.

But wait, what’s it for and why use it, you ask?

Twitter comes to mind. Bit.ly allows you to put links that would be way too long to fit in a twit.

It also gives you a way of tracking how many people bothered to click it – giving you

valuable feedback on what people are and aren’t interested in.

You can use bit.ly links in blog posts, tweets, emails, you name it and Bit.ly will also show

you where the hits are coming from.

For instance, here’s the Bit.ly link for this blog post (a new window will open to illustrate):

http://bit.ly/Z3QeD

Affiliate Links: – it’s also a great way to ‘mask’ affiliate links without having to create a subdomain or heaven forbid, you use the long drawn out gobbledy-gook affiliate link you are given.

You can also make multiple unique bit.ly urls for different ‘campaigns.’ They all will go to the same site you tell it to, but you can see which is producing results.

is it the link you put in an email to your list? or the link on a blog post? or tweet?

You get the idea…

For more serious/professional marketers looking for a slicker paid service, 

check out:   http://4u2bn.com