1) A URL shortener, for obvious reasons, shortens your URL so that it will fit into your advertising mediums.

We've all seen hugely long URLs in e-mails, on blog posts, and in advertising. Think

Amazon on this one. Often times when a link like that is copied, it breaks apart, a space mistakenly gets inserted and the link won't work. Shortening a URL will avoid this problem, make it easier for your customers to copy & paste the link, and get to your site or offer much faster and more reliably.

It also has the ability to look just a bit better if you've got an advertisement going out, and your link is short and to the point. Long URL links are off-putting to many people and generally very obvious it's an affiliate site. And yes, Amazon is an affiliate site.

2) URL shortener sites often offer tracking abilities, which can mean a lot of information about how well your link is doing.

Unless you are well-versed in how to track your links, track your traffic, know how to read and understand Google Analytics; if you're new, choosing a link shortener will give you a lot of information about where your traffic is coming from, how many clicks your link has received, and what people are doing on your site. Check out some of the links above to see which sites offer tracking services as part of their main service. There are a fair number that are totally free.

3) If you're in affiliate marketing, using a URL shortener can give you a bit of an edge to advertise your opportunity.

There are several benefits here for using a link shortener. First, many affiliate marketers who are just getting started are trying to use their affiliate links for their program. These links, again, can be quite long and arduous to keep intact.

Second, in advertising, it's important to not be a sheep. If you are promoting an affiliate product or program, and a couple thousand other people are also promoting it using the company's affiliate links... well, you're not going to get a whole lot of interest because the general public has been over exposed to the marketing. They may even have been turned off by some one else's marketing methods... so when they see Company XYZ in an affiliate link, it's an immediate click away or delete.

Advertising is just that -- A-D-V-E-R-T-I-S-I-N-G. You have to stand out. You have to grab attention. And you only have a few seconds to do that. You can have the greatest ad copy in the world, but if your link shows an affiliate id, your click throughs are going to be non-existent.

4) A URL shortener can make your not-so-fantastic domain name a non-issue.

From past experience, I know that sometimes we end up buying a domain name that ends up not being in the niche we want, or which just doesn't make sense to the general public.

But you have a domain name and you've decided to repurpose that site for some of your offers or products. Use a URL shortener to help avoid turning people off just due to the domain name. This can help you keep moving forward until you are ready or able to buy another domain name that suits your marketing efforts better.

5) If you're using Twitter or other social media methods, a shortened URL will greatly increase your allowed character count.

Primarily, I'm talking about Twitter here which only allows you 140 characters in a tweet. If you've got a long, long URL... how are you going to say anything about it to get people to click and look? Just sending the link is NOT going to get you views.

Twitter is all about how you can say something important, URGENT, and a call to action in 140 characters or less. Every single letter and symbol in your URL counts toward your character count. So get rid of that long URL.

Twitter is not the only place that a short URL is useful. Brevity is really useful in most all of your marketing efforts. Whether you're using Twitter, Goggle+, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever, save your readers' eyes, shorten your URLs and expect to see a better click-through on your posts.

Understanding the need and value in using URL shorteners is extremely important in your marketing efforts regardless if you're promoting your own products and services, or an affiliate marketer looking to gather leads into your flock.