bitlyA few days ago I read a great letter in Business Week from someone who had just lost their job, but was celebrating how it turned out to be a positive impact on their life. I love sharing good stories like this, and I have always wondered whether my followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook are reading the links I sent, or if they fall on deaf ears.

Bit.ly is a great tool for figuring out what impact you have when you refer your friends, followers and site visitors to sites you don’t own. Even for your own site, where you can set up Google Analytics, you can figure out exactly which marketing helped you the most.

To get started, visit bit.ly and make sure to sign up for an account (otherwise, you cannot see usage data for URLs you shorten). Once you have an account, simply enter the URL you want to point friends to into the big textbox. The site even features a handy box to share your newly shortened URL on twitter.

The site doesn’t have a feature for sharing your most popular links itself, but here are a few of my best bits:

Go ahead click on them and stroke my ego ;-)