Increasingly, a lot of affiliate marketers are using bit.ly as a convenient way to shorten and mask their affiliate URLs. But what many do not realize is the ease with which your competitor can spy on the stats of your shortened URL. Let me illustrate with an example.

Someone (obviously an affiliate marketer), posted this tweet on a making money on Twitter.

Want to make money go to http://bit.ly/sfxDF

Let’s say, you wanted to check how legit this person was and wanted to find out more without having to click his link. You could take his shortened URL http://bit.ly/sfxDF and add “info/” after http://bit.ly/ making the URL look like http://bit.ly/info/sfxDF.

Voilà, it shows me his bit.ly link stats. I can see he has had more than 1,700 clicks to that link, the location of his original link, which geographical regions generate the most clicks and whether there are any conversations going on in sites like Twitter and FriendFeed.

There you have it, a quick way to spy on bit.ly stats.

A number of people have contacted me to ask what happened to The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari Review. Well, it was on the old blog and it remains there especially because Robin Sharma’s website directly links to the page. That’s the reason I didn’t move it to the new blog. Partly it is laziness as I could always do a 301 redirect.

Here’s the link again: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari Review.