This is Stevea Robbins. Welcome to the Get It Done guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

It's holiday season at Green Growing Things Plant Store, and owner Bernice has decided to self-publish a book on the safe care and feeding of Audrey II carnivorous plants.

It's titled Blooms Without Blood, and she expects it to rocket to the top of

Amazon's list of gardening bestsellers. Being a savvy businesswoman, Bernice has every intention of

getting her book linked to everywhere she possibly can. Now, she'd like the link to be an affiliate link

so that she can get paid not just for being the author, but also for placing the distribution link. But there's only one problem.

The affiliate link is a mile long. It's https colon slash www. www.com slash blooms hyphen without hyphen blood slash DP-Z b00 z xQ i z 5w c slash ref equals a s underscore

l i s underscore s underscore t l question mark i equals ut f8 ampresan q id etc you get the picture

it's like bernice's first pet bulldog big ugly and ugly, and incomprehensible. That bulldog made

Bernice's very first Audrey, too, very happy. A URL shortener can save your affiliate links.

When you have a long affiliate link like that, you can barely post it anywhere. The link fills

an entire social media post, and you try to embed it in an email, and some email clients

actually will break

it halfway through as it wraps around to the next line. But there's a way to keep that from happening.

You can make it manageable with a URL shortener. The first URL shortener I ever encountered was

tiny URL.com. You enter a big, long, ugly URL, like Bernice's example, and Tiny URL gives

you back a short, beautiful URL that can go to the same place. For example, HTTP-cl slash,

tiny URL.com forward slash YL9 V2E8. That goes to the same place as that gigantic, long URL that Bernice was trying to use.

You can use a short URL wherever the long URL won't fit, and one click on the short link

redirects you back to the original long link. The short and URL is more than just shorter.

It's nicer and cleaner to look at, and it hides the affiliate codes

and the marketing tags, so if someone copies and pastes the link, they won't accidentally cut

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