Threadloom Blog

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Primary now support Skimlinks

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Primary is our new platform that helps shoppers find products by interest, and helps forum admins increase their affiliate revenue. Admins can embed product widgets that are automatically tagged with their own affiliate IDs, allowing them to capture 100% of the affiliate revenue generated on their sites.

Today, we’re happy to share that Primary now supports Skimlinks. This comes in addition to other affiliate platforms Primary already supports, including Amazon (all locales), eBay, Reverb, Sovrn (Viglink), and Sweetwater. We also now support the subId1 parameter for Sweetwater, so admins with multiple sites can break out their commission reports by site.

To add your Skimlinks affiliate ID, once a forum is activated for Primary, all the admin has to do is submit their Skimlinks ID, and we’ll automatically attach it to all Primary Embed widgets and lists.

To learn more about Primary, visit our webpage, or to get started, check out our Help Center article.

Announcing the new Primary for Forums plug-in

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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

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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.

Announcing Threadloom for XenForo 2.2

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We’re happy to share that we’ve updated the Threadloom plug-in for XenForo 2.2.

XenForo 2.2 adds thread types, non-registered guest replies, and a number of other improvements.  We think it’s a significant step forward for forums, and are excited to continue supporting forums on the XenForo platform.

If your forum is already using the Threadloom plug-in for XenForo 2, you don’t need to do anything to prepare for XenForo 2; Threadloom will automatically work with XenForo 2.2.

If your forum is migrating from vBulletin or XenForo 1.5, download and install the latest plug-in for XenForo 2 from your Threadloom Portal dashboard.

As before, the Threadloom plug-in delivers all of the features of Threadloom – Search, Newsletter, and List Builder – with the convenience of a single plug-in install.  Use one or all three products – it’s your choice.

You can find more details on upgrading the Threadloom plug-in in this Help Center article.

Announcing Threadloom plug-in updates with dual-search option

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Threadloom Search is now available as a supplemental option to native forum search

We’re happy to share that earlier this week, we released updated versions of our plug-ins for vBulletin 3 and 4, and XenForo 1.5 and 2.  As before, one plug-in gives you access to Threadloom Search, Newsletter, and/or List Builder for your forum.

In addition to various fixes and improvements, this update includes a new feature that lets your forum members choose (and save) Threadloom Search or your native forum search engine as their default search engine.  You no longer have to choose between the two – your members can have both. As an admin, however, you are able to set either option as the default search engine for new visitors to your forum.

Dual-search option with savable user preference
Dual-search option with savable user preference
Link from XenForo search results to Threadloom Search results
Link from XenForo search results to Threadloom Search results
Link from Threadloom Search results to XenForo search results
Link from Threadloom Search results to XenForo search results
User preference confirmation
User preference confirmation

This feature can be helpful for forum members who have grown used to the native forum search engine.  At the same time, it gives you the flexibility of simultaneously offering a powerful alternative to other members and new visitors.  Threadloom Search gives your forum a fast, modern search engine with image search, spell correction, and blog search. It is 10x faster than vBulletin search, and returns 10x as many results as XenForo search.  Whereas the click-through rate of most native forum search engines is often less than 10%, the search click-through rate for Threadloom Search is over 40%.

The following Help Center articles provide more information about the new feature:

We’re excited to help your visitors find your best content.  We hope that this update makes it easier for both long-time members as well new visitors to search in a way that is comfortable for them.

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