Bookmark It!: Tiny URL

Here’s a site for you to bookmark. It that won’t really help you with your writing, but could help you in your marketing. It's called Tiny URL.

If you’re out there on the Internet trying to promote your books (and I hope you are), then you’re learning about – or already doing – things like Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, virtual book tours and blogging (among probably a hundred other things).

When you Twitter, you only get 140 characters – that’s characters, not words – to tell your message. If 75 of those characters are taken by the URL you want your tweeps to visit, that doesn’t leave you many characters to tell them why. Let’s say I read one of Mark Troy’s post’s and wanted others to visit. I could put:
http://hawaiian-eye.blogspot.com/2008/10/tagged.html
Or I could Tiny URL it and put:
http://tinyurl.com/3nfk8k

And when you’re on a blog book tour promoting your book and you want to leave a link to a specific page or article, that link can run mighty long. Let’s look at an article on my site called 30 Tips for Blog Tour Hosts. The full URL is:
http://helenginger.com/blogging_advice.htm#blogtips
The Tiny URL is:
http://tinyurl.com/6ocrq7

Of course, sometimes you don’t have to worry about how long the URL is. You can embed the link so that the word or title becomes a hot link. If I had embedded the above link it would have looked like this: 30 Tips for Blog Tour Hosts. When you do that, the length of the URL doesn’t really matter.

But other times, it can matter. If the link is not embedded and it breaks and then when people click, only part of the link actually works which means the entire link doesn’t work.

So, if you haven’t bookmarked Tiny URL, then give it a try. It’s very easy to use.

Another thing that's very easy to use is this link: Emma Larkins, Emerging Author
I'm being interviewed today on Emma's blog. Stop by and ask a question or leave a comment. I don't say anything particularly smart, outlandish or disturbing.... But you can!