Threadloom Blog

Announcing the new Primary for Forums plug-in

Paul Lee · Jun 10, 2021

For the past several months, we’ve shared about our latest product, Primary, a new tool that helps forums monetize their product discussions. Primary finds products forum members are discussing and enables admins to insert them into Threadloom Newsletter and embed product widgets on their forum. Forums like Long Range Hunting have successfully used Primary to increase their affiliate revenue by over 50% (check out the case study).

Today, we’re excited to announce three significant updates to Primary:

1. New plug-in with Primary Embed

A new version of the Primary plug-in for XenForo 2 now enables admins to automatically insert product widgets on their forum (available for download on XenForo Community and The Admin Zone). You can choose any or all of the following features:

Primary Explorer: A carousel of products that varies which products are shown depending on which node the visitor is browsing.
Primary List: An auto-updating list of top products across your entire forum.
Primary Product Pages: Product details for any product in Explorer or List.

We call this feature Primary Embed, and the plug-in includes multiple ways that admins can customize their embeds. Admins who want even more control can customize their embeds using one of our pre-configured templates. Here’s a video overview of the plug-in:

2. Option to keep all clicks on your site

Admins can now direct clicks on Primary products in Threadloom Newsletter or Primary Embed, to the embedded product page on their forum. This means visitors stay on your forum, and no longer have to go back and forth between your forum and https://primary.org.

3. Bring your own affiliate IDs and keep 100% of revenue

Instead of using Threadloom’s affiliate IDs, Primary now automatically loads your affiliate IDs on all Primary retail links in Threadloom Newsletter or Primary Embed. You no longer need to wait for an aggregate report from Threadloom – you can optimize your placements as soon as your affiliate platforms report the data. In addition, Primary no longer includes revenue sharing – you keep 100% of the revenue you generate on your site through Primary. All we ask for is a single instance of attribution for each type of Primary Embed content.

Learn more about Primary, and how to get started.

We’re excited to help forums make the most of their rich product discussions.

Video: Inserting products in Threadloom Newsletter

Evan Caulley · May 7, 2021

Primary is a new platform that enables admins to showcase and monetize their best product discussions.

Here’s a brief 1-minute video that shows you how to automatically insert products in your Newsletter, once you’ve enabled Primary for your account. The entire process takes less than one minute. The video also shows you how to manually edit your product selections in Curation Assistant.

To learn more about this feature, read our original blog post or check out the Primary info page.

Introducing automated Primary product insertion in Threadloom Newsletter

Greg Hecht · Mar 16, 2021

We introduced Primary in January to help forums monetize their product discussions. Primary identifies products forum members are discussing, and makes it easy for admins to earn affiliate revenue by inserting a product carousel on their forums, or product stories in Threadloom Newsletter.

Today, we’re happy to share our latest Primary feature – automated insertion of Primary products in Threadloom Newsletter. Beginning this week, Primary customers can configure their product insertion settings directly in the Threadloom Portal. If you’ve enabled Primary, all you have to do is navigate to the Content page in Newsletter settings, and check the box to enable product insertion.

We recommend also enabling Auto-pilot. When Auto-pilot is enabled, Threadloom will automatically select and insert products into your Newsletter issue without requiring your explicit approval for each issue. Even with Auto-pilot enabled, you’ll still be able to review and edit product selections in the Curation Portal during the review period.

Finally, you can select how many products to include in each issue. Generally, we recommend starting with two products per issue, and increasing this number if your community has numerous product discussions that provide a diverse set of products across issues.

We’re excited to help forums make their product discussions easier to find, and to help admins generate revenue with Primary so they can continue to grow their communities.

If you have any questions about Primary or inserting products in Newsletter, please feel free to drop us a line.

Introducing Hosted Newsletter: Automatically build an archive of your forum’s best content

Alex Wilsey · Mar 1, 2021

We’re excited to announce Hosted Newsletter, a new feature available to all Threadloom Newsletter customers beginning today. Hosted Newsletter enables forum admins to automatically publish Newsletter issues to their forum and create an archive of their forum’s best content.

Since 2016, Threadloom Newsletter has delivered over 500 million email newsletters on behalf of our forum customers. Each issue provides subscribers with a concise summary of your forum’s best content, and encourages readers to visit your forum. As a result, Threadloom Newsletter has an industry-leading unique open rate of 28% and unique click rate of 8%.

With Hosted Newsletter, we are excited to be able to offer admins a way to automatically save this content directly on their forum and make it accessible to visitors who don’t regularly receive Threadloom Newsletter.

How does Hosted Newsletter work?

Hosted Newsletter consists of three components:

an RSS feed;
BBcode; and
your forum’s RSS importer.

Together, these components automatically publish “Highlighted Posts” from your Threadloom Newsletter to your forum without any manual work.

First, Threadloom Newsletter generates an RSS feed for your forum. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML feed that allows applications to access content updates – in this case, your latest Threadloom Newsletter issue – in a standardized way. Threadloom Newsletter hosts the RSS feed for you and updates it every time you send a new issue.

Second, in order to optimize the layout for your forum, we generate a BBCode version of your Newsletter issue and store it in the RSS feed using plain text.

Finally, using the built-in RSS importer in vBulletin and XenForo, you can automatically fetch updates from your Threadloom RSS feed and publish new issues to a node or sub-forum of your choice.

Once you’ve set up the RSS importer, you’re all set. It will automatically import your new Newsletter issues to your forum without any additional work from you. Each issue also contains a link to a browser-friendly version (which is now also available in the email version).*

The entire setup process takes about 10 minutes. We’ve created a step-by-step guide here.

How does Hosted Newsletter help?

Hosted Newsletter helps your visitors easily find your forum’s best content and catch up on posts they might have otherwise missed. While many of your registered members may subscribe to your Threadloom Newsletter, and some of your drive-by visitors may sign up using List Builder, Hosted Newsletter provides everyone with a fast and easy way to access this content on demand.

In our early tests, we’ve seen Hosted Newsletter result in longer sessions, more pages per session, and lower bounce rates. In the figure below, the top row is from general forum sessions, and the bottom row is from sessions where a visitor engaged with Hosted Newsletter.

Fig. 1: Google Analytics data from early tests

How do I get started with Hosted Newsletter?

If you are already a Threadloom Newsletter customer, starting today, the address for your Hosted Newsletter RSS feed is in your Threadloom Portal Newsletter settings page. You can find the rest of the steps in this Help Center article. If you have any questions along the way, drop us a line and we’d be happy to help.

If you aren’t yet a Threadloom Newsletter customer, it’s easy to get started. You get 25,000 emails per month for free, and you don’t even need to provide a credit card. You can learn more about Threadloom Newsletter here, or drop us a line.

* Note: Your RSS feed and browser-friendly version of your Newsletter are hosted on primary.org. For the past five years, you may have known us as only Threadloom. If you’ve been following our blog, you know that we’ve been working with partner forums on new ways of distributing content to consumers. We’ve been doing this using Primary, our consumer-facing brand, and have had some exciting results. Don’t worry – nothing is changing for Threadloom customers. Threadloom continues to be our brand for admins. But if you’d like to learn more about Primary, or are simply curious, check out this blog post or drop us a line.

Sharing our first Collections for Primary Long Range Hunting

Paul Lee · Jan 11, 2021

What do Meopta binoculars, a Nightforce throw lever, and a Cabela’s scope have in common? They are among the products long range hunters are discussing when talking about long range scopes and optics.

Last week, we opened up forum sign-ups for Primary, a new service for hobbyists to discover products related to their interests, and for forums to monetize their product discussions.

Primary organizes products through SEO-friendly landing pages called Collections, like the one mentioned above for long range scopes and optics. Below are links to some of our initial Collections for Primary Long Range Hunting. We created Primary Long Range Hunting in partnership with Long Range Hunting (LRH), the leading forum for long range hunting enthusiasts, with over 100,000 registered members.

For each of our initial Collections, Primary automatically selects and updates products and comments daily. We select LRH member comments using the same algorithms that power Threadloom Newsletter and Search. Each product also includes purchase links as well as links to the relevant forum post.

Example Collection from Primary Long Range Hunting

Collection	URL
Most Discussed Rifles, Reloading, Optics, and Equipment for Long Range Hunting	https://primary.org/collection/longrangehunting/c1:nc:14/most-discussed-rifles-reloading-optics-equipment-for-long-range-hunting
Most Discussed Products & Accessories for Hunting	https://primary.org/collection/longrangehunting/c1:nc:15/most-discussed-products-and-accessories-for-hunting
Most Discussed Rifles, Bullets, Barrels & Ballistics for Long Range Hunting	https://primary.org/collection/longrangehunting/c1:nc:17/most-discussed-rifles-bullets-barrels-and-ballistics-for-long-range-hunting
Most Discussed Long Range Scopes and Other Optics for Long Range Hunting	https://primary.org/collection/longrangehunting/c1:nc:19/most-discussed-long-range-scopes-and-other-optics-for-long-range-hunting
Most Discussed Products & Accessories for Gunsmithing	https://primary.org/collection/longrangehunting/c1:nc:20/most-discussed-products-and-accessories-for-gunsmithing

We’re also excited to announce that we have begun distributing our first affiliate revenue share payments to Primary forum partners. Primary shows the most-discussed products regardless of whether we receive an affiliate commission. However, if we do realize a revenue commission, we share this with the forum partner in proportion to their percentage of session referrals.

If you’d like to learn more about Primary, feel free to drop us a line, or sign up here.

Note: We are currently launching one forum per vertical. We select forums based on their sign-up order and the quality of their content. We plan to expand to multiple forums per vertical later this year, and encourage you to sign up even if your vertical has already been claimed.