Why Affiliates Should Not Use 3rd Party URL Shorteners

If you have been taking advantage of Twitter, you have probably used URL shorteners to keep your status updates under 140 characters. Third party URL shorteners do make it easy to make your URLs more clean and keep track of clicks and shares of each link. Services such as TinyURL, Bit.ly, and BudURL have all been around for a while and provide a lot of value to those who choose to use them.

There are many reasons why one would want to use these services to track affiliate links. In fact, a lot of gurus suggest that without really thinking about the ramifications. For starters, if you have long term plans for your affiliate portal, you want to brand everything you can, including your link. Using solutions such as Redirection will allow you to create your very own URL shortener without relying on any other company. Even if you do not want to brand your web assets, you still have to come terms with the reality that these companies won’t stick around forever. Not all of them anyway. Unless you can read the future, there is no way to assume which URL shortener will survive. If you build your affiliate portal using their links, you are going to spend some time changing your links when these companies go out of business. That may be easy to do if you have only 2 pages on your site. But once you have thousands of pages on your site, things become much more complicated.

Bit.ly and similar services offer great value to their users. Some are being used by top companies around the globe (pro editions). If you don’t plan on using a pro level plan (with your own domain), then you are probably better off using Redirection plugin to keep control of your links. When something changes, you’ll be able to react without relying on any third-party company. Who wouldn’t like that?