As promoters for Beta, you've probably noticed that on certain guest list links there is a space for a guest to enter the name of the Street Team member or Promoter that referred them. This is to ensure that each of you gets proper credit for all of your online and social media referral efforts. This page will help you take steps to make sure you always get credit for your online referrals.
The following image is an example of what that might look like.
We all know, though, that people can be pretty unreliable, stupid, lazy, or whatever other qualities that would prevent them from actually taking the time to type in the correct name every time they sign up. So, to help with this, when I wrote the guest list collection software for Beta, I built in a cool little trick to make sure your name always gets properly inserted, automatically, every time someone clicks on one of your promotional links. You get proper credit each time someone signs up, and all you have to do is put in a little extra work when posting your links. In the next steps, I'll show you exactly how to make sure it's your name in that box.
We're all familiar with these by now, they're the thing that that ends up in the address bar of your web browser.
They come in two different styles, for example:
They both do the same thing, the short link is just handy for posting on Twitter and ths such. The important bit of the link is the last six characters ("pcy3xy"), which is a special sequence that determines which list the link connects to.
Because we're making web links (called a "URL"), we have to 'encode' everything a certain way. Encoding things basically just means to make sure the computer reads it correctly. If you really want details, you can read up about Percent Encoding on Wikipedia.
In this case, we're going to encode our name. With most names it's pretty simple; since almost all western names are just a first and last part, we just encode the space between them as "%20" (percent sign, number two, number zero). For example, my name, "Justin Ryan," becomes "Justin%20Ryan" with no spaces. Your name is probably just as easy to encode, but if it includes any other characters, like apostrophes (which are encoded as "%27"), it's probably easiest to just use a utility to encode your name automatically. You can click here for a pretty simple online encoder, use it to encode your name, and then come back here for the last two steps.
Now we're going to add our name, plus a little extra magic, to the original link, to create a custom link that magically fills in our name on the guest list form. There are three parts to assemble:
All we have to do is add the three parts together in that order. For example, for my name the custom link becomes: http://betate.ch/pcy3xy?promoter=Justin%20Ryan. Here's what that would look like with the full link:
Now all you've got to do is spread that link around! You should probably test it fist to make sure you did everything correctly, but assuming you did, go out there and get that guest list credit. What does it look like when you get it correct? When you load up your super-cool custom link in the browser, you'll notice that your name is now automatically added to the 'Promoter' field.
If you need assistance, or just can't figure it out, shoot me an email: [email protected] Otherwise, happy promoting, people! See you on the dance floor.