Ontraport Locked Links

In today’s ClickFix, you’ll learn how our exclusive Locked Links™️ work to give you more control over how people interact with the links you share.

In basic terms, Locked Links™️ give you the opportunity to create links that you can expire or lock after:
A) A certain amount of time passes
B) A contact clicks on them a certain number of times

In a separate video, we’ll go over some potential uses cases to help get your creative juices flowing. So, let’s jump into the ClickFix dashboard and take a look at how to get started.

Once you’re on the Locked Links™️ page, the first thing you’ll want to do is to give your locked link a descriptive name. This name is strictly for your internal use, so you’ll want to name it something that’ll help you keep them organized.

For our purposes, we’ll just call this one Locked Link Demo.

Next, we’ll select the Ontraport application key that we want to use. If you haven’t set up your Ontraport Key yet, navigate to Settings > Ontraport API Keys & set one up right now because all of the ClickFix apps will ask for your key before allowing you to use them. If you need help setting up your key, please refer to the video tutorial linked on that page.

After selecting your Ontraport key, you’ll need to select the field that you’ll be using to store your locked link information inside the contact record. I’ll explain exactly what you can do with this field in a minute, but first let’s head over to Ontraport to get that set up.

Your navigation may vary depending on your Ontraport subscription, but you’ll want to look for the “Field Editor” which for us is under Contacts > Settings.

It’s up to you where you want your fields to live, but it’s probably a good idea to organize these in their own section since you’ll need to create separate fields for every locked link that you want to keep active.

I’ve gone ahead and made a “Locked Links” section and created a text field called “Locked Link Demo” but you can call yours anything you want.

While you’re there, you should also make a numeric field, which I called “Demo Counter,” but you can call it anything you want. I’ll explain what each field is used for in a moment.

Don’t forget to save the field editor and then head back over to ClickFix.

You’ll probably want to deselect and then reselect your Ontraport Application Key at this point so it refreshes the field selectors with the latest additions.

Now when we begin typing the name of the field we just created, we’ll be able to select it from the results. Do the same with counter field.

Next we need to select the destination URL that we want people to see when they click on an active link. In other words, if the link isn’t locked or restricted where should we send them.

In this case, I’ll just use the main ClickFix.io website.

After that, you’ll want to select whether this is a website or a file. The main difference is that if it is a file, then you’ll get an extra layer of protection by keeping the file extension secret.

Then, we’ll put in the URL that people should be taken to when the link is locked by the time or click options we’ll select in the next step.

In our case we’re going to send them to a MEME.

Now we’ll need to decide how we want to lock our link. At the moment we have three options.

First, we can lock the link after a certain number of days or hours. We’ll explore this deeper in the use case video, but for now just imagine using this during a flash sale where your prospects only have X days to take advantage of a discount.

Second, we can lock the link according to the number of clicks on the link. Please keep in mind that this click count is on a per contact basis. In other words, this is not what you’d use if you were trying to limit the number of global clicks to a link. Instead, this is more for ensuring that your content isn’t being shared or to limit the number of times someone accesses a piece of content.

Last, you can use a combination of both time and clicks to lock your link. Whichever condition is met first will trigger the lock and send the person to the expired link URL chosen above.

OK, so after saving you’ll get the webhook that you’ll need to activate your locked link. Go ahead and copy that, then head back over to Ontraport.

Navigate to Campaigns and then start a new campaign or choose an existing one if you prefer. I just started one from scratch. Because I’m going to add a contact here manually, all I did was add a Send a Webhook element under the default trigger.

Then I simply paste in the webhook generated by ClickFix into the first box and click Done. Now publish the campaign and you’re all set.

The last thing that’s left before you can use your locked link is to put the contacts you want to use the locked links into the campaign you just created. In most cases, that’ll probably be everyone on your list so you can just add everyone to the campaign.

However, I’ll just show you what it looks like with my test profile so you know what to expect.

As you can see, a link has now been pushed into the contact record. When we paste it into our browser, it takes us to ClickFix.io just like it’s supposed to.

But now let’s lock the link manually so you can see what happens.

To do so, all I need to do is delete the URL currently there and save the change.

Now when I visit that link, you can see that it takes me to my Locked Links™️ URL instead.
That means that now you have an easy way to keep your content from being shared without authorization, to help increase conversions by including real scarcity or any number of creative ways to use this feature to help grow your business.