With Ontraport, you can use promo tools and generate links to better understand your partners’ referrals. See how it works in this deep dive tutorial.
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Home > Ontraport for marketing > Partners > Creating links and promo tools for partners
Creating links and promo tools for partners
Course Instructor
- How promo tools help your partners sell
- How to create promo tools
- The way to manually create links for partners
- Two ways to share affiliate links
- How to know what's working best
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Transcript
Once you have a partner program setup and you’re ready to start getting referrals your next step is to generate links for your partners that will properly track which partner sent you which lead.
Promo tools give you an easy way to share these links with your partners, and also a way to track which promotions actually work well.
At the end of the day, promo tools are just a bit of code that you share with your partners which contains their tracking ID. The idea is that they then share that code with their audience. The code might be a simple link, or it might be a banner or an email… but either way, the goal is that your partner’s audience clicks on it and visits your site and buys your products.
In this video, I’ll show you how to create promo tools, share them with your partners, and understand the stats that get created for you.
I’ll also show you how to manually create tracking links in case you want to do that instead.
But first, let's take a look at each type of promo tool to see all the different ways your partners can make you rich. Well, we’re not sure about that last part… but here’s how to use the tools anyway.
To find your promo tools, go to “Partners,” then “Programs” and select your partner program.
You’ll find the promo tools tab on the left side. Each Partner Program in here has its own set of promo tools.
In the “Promo Tools” tab you’ll see the promo tools collection, where you’ll find every tool that you’ve created for this program.
Let’s break down all the fields you see in promo tools. You can see the “Promo Tool Name” here.
Use “Promo Tool URL” to set up where people will end up when they click your promo tool.
“Campaign Name” is similar to UTM variables. So, you can have multiple tools in one campaign and look at the campaign stats in aggregate. This isn’t required, so just be aware you won’t always see a value here.
“Ad Name” is like “Campaign Name,” but for an ad. The same thing applies where you can have multiple tools in the same ad to look at the stats together. Again, it’s not required.
“Visits” here shows the number of times people have clicked on this tool.
“Opt ins” shows you the number of contacts who opted in after clicking this promo tool.
“# Sales” tells you how many sales you got from people who arrived after clicking your promo tool.
“Commission” shows you the dollar amount of commissions, and “Refunds” shows you see the dollar amount of refunds that came through this tool.
If you want to create new promo tools, click “Add New Promotional Item.” That’ll bring up the promo tool creation pop-up. “Promo Tool Name” is where you name your promo tool. It’s a good idea to name it after the product or pages you’re promoting, rather than your dog or something.
“URL to Promote” is the page this tool will send people to when they click on your link. Make sure this page has the Ontraport tracking script installed.
You can name a “Product Group” if this tool is part of a certain set of products you're promoting. This information shows up in the Ontraport Partner Center and helps your partners know which promo tools go with which products.
If this tool is part of a marketing campaign, “Campaign Name” is where you can designate that. Just like product groups, this information will show up in the Partner Center.
If this tool is part of a specific ad, this is where you can name the ad. It will also display in the Ontraport Partner Center.
If you look at Promo Tool Type, you’ll see five different types of promo tools your Partners can use to promote your products. Each one contains information to cookie the people who click your partner’s promo tool, so you can keep track of where they came from.
The “Banner” is an image you select and then upload to Ontraport when you create the promo tool. Partners can then download the banner from their Partner Center and place it on web pages or emails. For example, you could add your logo or a seal you created for your coaching business. Partners could add that to their site, and then get credit when people click the image and purchase.
You can also create a “Lightbox” when you create a promo tool. Lightboxes are designed as pop ups to be placed on your website. So, just FYI: you shouldn’t put them in emails -- they won’t work right. You’ll upload the image you want to use for the lightbox, and you’ll be able to access it from the Partner Center.
If you go this route, it’s a good practice to use an image that has a call to action. It could be something like, “Click here to check out my out-of-this world salsa recipe.” This gives someone something to do when they see this pop up on their screen.
A “Standard Link” is one that displays your Ontraport tracking domain. This promo sends prospects to the tracking domain and then redirects them to the URL to promote. You can send standard links to your contacts as a merge field in an email.
With standard links, you can update the URL to promote within Ontraport and your partners’ existing links will not break. This is helpful if you decide to change where you want new referrals to go after a campaign has started.
There are also “Direct Links.” These hyperlinks display the URL to promote directly to your partners. Like standard links, you can send them via email merge fields, and you can still find them in the Partner Center.
Unlike standard links, Direct Links can break if you decide to change the URL to promote after your partners have started using them. Because of that, Direct Links are best for shorter promotions that you don’t plan to revisit in the future.
“Email Message” is a promo tool type that lets you create a promotional email. Your partners copy the email and send it out to their lists. You’ll need to use the merge field menu in the tool to add standard or direct link promo tools in the body of the email.
This tool is designed to work with HTML email editors. If your partners don’t have access to this kind of email editor, no problem. Just send them the copy, and allow them to add their own promo tools.
Ok, now that you’ve created promo tools, I’ll quickly talk about manually creating links for your partners. We’ve found over the years that some more seasoned partner program enthusiasts like doing that.
Before I start, there are a few things to note right off the bat:
Now, creating the link is as simple as adding this to the backend of any normal link:
?orid=[Contact ID]
So a full link might be something like https://yourwebsite.com/pagename?orid=[Contact ID]
Everything before the question mark is just the URL of the page you want the link to go to, while everything after it you’ll need to add yourself. This variable here, orid, is short for the Ontraport referrer ID, and this is the merge field for Contact ID.
When you send this to your partners in an email from Ontraport, that merge field will get filled out like any other merge field, and that link will be ready to use.
You can also take this one step further and simply copy and paste a contact’s ID number into the URL instead of the merge field like this, assuming your partner is ID # 12345 of course.
The next step is to get them to your partners so they can use them!
There are two ways to do that.
The first, and the easiest way is to send them off in an email. This doesn’t work with the more complicated promo tools like banners and email copy… but for links, this works great.
Just create an email, and go to the merge field icon just like you did with the manual links. Then scroll down until you see ‘affiliate links’. There you’ll see a list of all your direct and standard affiliate links, and you can just pop it right into the email.
For the more complicated promo tools, you’ll need to create an affiliate center where your partners can login and grab the code. We covered how to do that in a separate video, so check that one out if you’re going to go deep with promo tools.
That’s the whole enchilada! Partner programs are one of the best ways you can spread the word about your business. You’ve learned a lot, so take a minute to savor your achievement. When you’re ready, move on to some of our other features including another marketing tool, Facebook Custom Audiences.
Promo tools give you an easy way to share these links with your partners, and also a way to track which promotions actually work well.
At the end of the day, promo tools are just a bit of code that you share with your partners which contains their tracking ID. The idea is that they then share that code with their audience. The code might be a simple link, or it might be a banner or an email… but either way, the goal is that your partner’s audience clicks on it and visits your site and buys your products.
In this video, I’ll show you how to create promo tools, share them with your partners, and understand the stats that get created for you.
I’ll also show you how to manually create tracking links in case you want to do that instead.
But first, let's take a look at each type of promo tool to see all the different ways your partners can make you rich. Well, we’re not sure about that last part… but here’s how to use the tools anyway.
To find your promo tools, go to “Partners,” then “Programs” and select your partner program.
You’ll find the promo tools tab on the left side. Each Partner Program in here has its own set of promo tools.
In the “Promo Tools” tab you’ll see the promo tools collection, where you’ll find every tool that you’ve created for this program.
Let’s break down all the fields you see in promo tools. You can see the “Promo Tool Name” here.
Use “Promo Tool URL” to set up where people will end up when they click your promo tool.
“Campaign Name” is similar to UTM variables. So, you can have multiple tools in one campaign and look at the campaign stats in aggregate. This isn’t required, so just be aware you won’t always see a value here.
“Ad Name” is like “Campaign Name,” but for an ad. The same thing applies where you can have multiple tools in the same ad to look at the stats together. Again, it’s not required.
“Visits” here shows the number of times people have clicked on this tool.
“Opt ins” shows you the number of contacts who opted in after clicking this promo tool.
“# Sales” tells you how many sales you got from people who arrived after clicking your promo tool.
“Commission” shows you the dollar amount of commissions, and “Refunds” shows you see the dollar amount of refunds that came through this tool.
If you want to create new promo tools, click “Add New Promotional Item.” That’ll bring up the promo tool creation pop-up. “Promo Tool Name” is where you name your promo tool. It’s a good idea to name it after the product or pages you’re promoting, rather than your dog or something.
“URL to Promote” is the page this tool will send people to when they click on your link. Make sure this page has the Ontraport tracking script installed.
You can name a “Product Group” if this tool is part of a certain set of products you're promoting. This information shows up in the Ontraport Partner Center and helps your partners know which promo tools go with which products.
If this tool is part of a marketing campaign, “Campaign Name” is where you can designate that. Just like product groups, this information will show up in the Partner Center.
If this tool is part of a specific ad, this is where you can name the ad. It will also display in the Ontraport Partner Center.
If you look at Promo Tool Type, you’ll see five different types of promo tools your Partners can use to promote your products. Each one contains information to cookie the people who click your partner’s promo tool, so you can keep track of where they came from.
The “Banner” is an image you select and then upload to Ontraport when you create the promo tool. Partners can then download the banner from their Partner Center and place it on web pages or emails. For example, you could add your logo or a seal you created for your coaching business. Partners could add that to their site, and then get credit when people click the image and purchase.
You can also create a “Lightbox” when you create a promo tool. Lightboxes are designed as pop ups to be placed on your website. So, just FYI: you shouldn’t put them in emails -- they won’t work right. You’ll upload the image you want to use for the lightbox, and you’ll be able to access it from the Partner Center.
If you go this route, it’s a good practice to use an image that has a call to action. It could be something like, “Click here to check out my out-of-this world salsa recipe.” This gives someone something to do when they see this pop up on their screen.
A “Standard Link” is one that displays your Ontraport tracking domain. This promo sends prospects to the tracking domain and then redirects them to the URL to promote. You can send standard links to your contacts as a merge field in an email.
With standard links, you can update the URL to promote within Ontraport and your partners’ existing links will not break. This is helpful if you decide to change where you want new referrals to go after a campaign has started.
There are also “Direct Links.” These hyperlinks display the URL to promote directly to your partners. Like standard links, you can send them via email merge fields, and you can still find them in the Partner Center.
Unlike standard links, Direct Links can break if you decide to change the URL to promote after your partners have started using them. Because of that, Direct Links are best for shorter promotions that you don’t plan to revisit in the future.
“Email Message” is a promo tool type that lets you create a promotional email. Your partners copy the email and send it out to their lists. You’ll need to use the merge field menu in the tool to add standard or direct link promo tools in the body of the email.
This tool is designed to work with HTML email editors. If your partners don’t have access to this kind of email editor, no problem. Just send them the copy, and allow them to add their own promo tools.
Ok, now that you’ve created promo tools, I’ll quickly talk about manually creating links for your partners. We’ve found over the years that some more seasoned partner program enthusiasts like doing that.
Before I start, there are a few things to note right off the bat:
- You need to make sure the page you’re linking to has Ontraport tracking scripts. We have a video that shows you how to do this in the Getting Started course, and if you’re using Ontraport Pages, the scripts are already on there.
- You need to be using Ontraport forms to capture leads and sales. This one should go without saying.
- This works based on your partner’s ID number, which is their contact ID number as well. To see contacts’ ID numbers, navigate to their record. You’ll see their ID number in two places: the URL of your browser here, and in a contact field for Contact ID.
Now, creating the link is as simple as adding this to the backend of any normal link:
?orid=[Contact ID]
So a full link might be something like https://yourwebsite.com/pagename?orid=[Contact ID]
Everything before the question mark is just the URL of the page you want the link to go to, while everything after it you’ll need to add yourself. This variable here, orid, is short for the Ontraport referrer ID, and this is the merge field for Contact ID.
When you send this to your partners in an email from Ontraport, that merge field will get filled out like any other merge field, and that link will be ready to use.
You can also take this one step further and simply copy and paste a contact’s ID number into the URL instead of the merge field like this, assuming your partner is ID # 12345 of course.
The next step is to get them to your partners so they can use them!
There are two ways to do that.
The first, and the easiest way is to send them off in an email. This doesn’t work with the more complicated promo tools like banners and email copy… but for links, this works great.
Just create an email, and go to the merge field icon just like you did with the manual links. Then scroll down until you see ‘affiliate links’. There you’ll see a list of all your direct and standard affiliate links, and you can just pop it right into the email.
For the more complicated promo tools, you’ll need to create an affiliate center where your partners can login and grab the code. We covered how to do that in a separate video, so check that one out if you’re going to go deep with promo tools.
That’s the whole enchilada! Partner programs are one of the best ways you can spread the word about your business. You’ve learned a lot, so take a minute to savor your achievement. When you’re ready, move on to some of our other features including another marketing tool, Facebook Custom Audiences.
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