COOL TOOL

One of the coolest tools I’ve come across is TinyURL.

You know how sometimes the URL to the website you want to direct your clients to becomes so long that it breaks in the emails you send? So instead of simply clicking on it and getting redirected to where you would have them go, they have to cut and paste the URL back together before being able to click. Well, you know some clients have the attention span of a goldfish (i.e. 3 seconds). Make them have to do that little additional work and pssshhhht...they’re out of there.

Or if you’re an affiliate marketer, you may find it desirable to hide your affiliate link. Many article directories do not accept articles with affiliate links. I know Ezine Articles, for one, doesn’t. A lost of readers too are wary about clicking on a link that they’ve learned to recognize as an affiliate link. Right away they think, “Uh oh. Here comes the hard sell.”

Okay, so what to do? You can choose to use a url redirect so that your links don’t look like an affiliate link. A lot of top earning internet and affiliate marketers do this.

So instead of a link with 52 characters that looks like this:

http://57090du-zzgqo89ywfxe4oaz4f.hop.clickbank.net/

you get a 25-character URL that looks like this:

http://tinyurl.com/mratl7

Cool, huh? Doesn’t look like an affiliate link anymore. And you know what? Doing this helps to increase click throughs and - that thing we’re all targeting – SALES.

And again one of the coolest features of this handy little tool is that it’s FREE!!

There is a backside to using TinyURLs though. As with any good thing that comes along, its subject to abuse. Some unscrupulous people have used the tool to redirect the unwary to completely unexpected and sometimes wholly unwholesome sites. Thus, some websites have responded by blocking TinyURLs and other url aliases from being posted. So be sure to test your links upon submission to any website.

Since your goal is to redirect, not misdirect, you an opt to give your client a preview of the site you're directing him to before he actually goes there. Using the example above, the url for the preview to the redirect site would be: http://preview.tinyurl.com/mratl7 . By clicking to that, a new window with a preview opens up. No nasty surprises for your client.

For those of you who haven’t discovered it, you can try it out here.

http://tinyurl.com/

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