I’ve tried quite a few link shortening services; there’s a lot of them out there. Most recently I’ve used http://www.offtourl.com and it seems to work very well, as well as being free.

Cheers
John.

As far as the tool itself is concerned it’s fine. My problem with any third party tool is what do you do if you ever decide to leave the site?

I like WA a lot and can’t imagine ever leaving. What I get out of it each month pays for itself 10X. But you never know what could happen in the future.

If I have 500 links spread all over the web (on blog posts, in ebooks, forums, social sites that virally propagate a link) then I’m forced to stay at WA, or whatever other pay site I’m using with the linker tool.

If you don’t want to set up your own linker then at least with something like budurl you know you’re not going to have to pay for more than a linker just to get a linker.

btw, I noticed budurl has released their pay plans and for most people the free version will suffice. But if you’re a power marketer you may end up paying there too, but the cost is very low.

Will start shrinking today.

Thx.

It’s good that they have paid plans since it mitigates one of my concerns that they might spring a user fee on you after you’ve built a link empire. So with budurl you know what you;re getting into up front.

With tinyurl there’s still the issue of what will happen in the future. Will they eventually go the way of paid service too? With budurl offering a paid service it may be the push tiny url needs to do the same.

It’s always a good idea to check each cloaker with each affiliate product you plan to promote. The way I do this is when I decide to promote a new product I simply create the cloaked link and try it myself BEFORE I drop it on a page somewhere. This way I can ensure the click gets tracked and I know it didn’t come from anyone else.

If I’m testing a new cloaker with an old affiliate product I’ve been promoting for a while I’ll usually just set up a second affiliate account with no stats just to test out the cloaker.

A bit of a pain but it works and I can sleep at night

I don’t like to use 3rd party services for the reasons you mentioned.

Good post, I’ll continue to look for a great solution I can host myself.

Actually I bought the product to test it and wasn’t even made aware there was master resale rights available. Then I found a sight listing it much cheaper than what I paid AND it included the master resale rights. Anyway, perhaps the guy pushing the resale rights is just ripping it off. I’m looking into it.