TinyURL.com is good for your blog posts – actually, anywhere where you have limited space – Twitter comes to mind, and e-mails.
From now on, when you have a long web address, go to TinyURL.com, paste the long URL into the box, let TinyURL.com create a short one, or enter your own, then copy the URL, and paste it into your blog post, e-mail, or Tweet. The address that is created for you, never expires.
TinyURL.com even has a browser plugin so that creating shorter URLs is right on your desktop.
For example, here’s a long URL [100 characters] to a story in the Wall Street Journal about which I wrote my last post. I spliced it into multiple lines.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB121803326363016929.html? mod=SmallBusinessTechnology_
feature_articles
With TinyURL.com, I was able to create this much shorter [39 characters] link:
I’m filing this under Best Practices because I think it is a habit we should work on developing. For as long as we have services like TinyURL.com, shorter URLS are better! Plus you can give the URLs meaningful words like “creating-website” – and those are words that my audience understands.