Hi Affiliates!

It's been a while since I've created a blog post here.

I've been hard at work on my product launch on Clickbank.  I can't wait to get the site up and running!

Anyways, I've been experimenting with some new free software lately...and thought I'd share.

The software is called Yourls, and it is a way for you to shorten urls using any domain name you own.

When posting links on Facebook, Twitter or my blog I often use a service like bit.ly.

Bit.ly allows me to create a short link, as well as track some interesting statistics.

I've always been a worrier however, and got to thinking one day.  "What if bit.ly went belly up?"

My links and stats would disappear!

Ok, I'm probably going a bit overboard on this one...but hey, why not take a look for a solution while I have my boxers in a bunch.

So that's when I came across Yourls.  As I said it's free to download and install.  You will need your own domain name, as well as hosting...so there will be some costs to implementing this technique.

Well to make a long story longer, I went out and bought myself a new domain name.  A lot of marketers will use redirection services on their blog like http://www.someblogger.com/recommends/product1 or http://www.someblogger.com/likes/product2.

So I put my thinking cap on and came up with a domain name I can use...and sorry for tooting my own horn, but I thought it was pretty clever.

My name is Eric Transue....initials et.  So I purchased the domain http://etlikes.me. ; So now I can create my short links.

For instance I'm always recommending Makret Samurai to readers from my blog.  So, I can create a link to the 7 day free trial and it would look like this.  http://etlikes.me/marketsamurai (this is an affiliate link, download this amazing software at your own risk :) ).  Of course if I was limited for space on a site like Twitter I could just use ms instead of spelling it out.  But I think you get the point.

So far the redirection seems to be quick and the stats provided are pretty cool.

You can see a screenshot on my blog post http://www.erictransue.com/1163/easily-create-a-personalized-url-with-yourls/ (unshortend link obviously..haha).

Well back to working on my Clickbank product...hope you enjoyed this post.

Eric Transue