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Introducing automated Primary product insertion in Threadloom Newsletter

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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

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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:

  1. an RSS feed;
  2. BBcode; and
  3. 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.

Introducing Primary: Helping forums monetize product discussions

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Note: We are now accepting new forum sign-ups for Primary.  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.

Over the past five years, our products – Threadloom Search, Newsletter, and List Builder – have helped forums connect millions of visitors with their best content.  If you follow our blog, you know that we’ve been working on making the experience even better for one specific type of content: product discussions.

Today, we’re excited to announce our newest product that helps forums organize and monetize product discussions: Primary.  Primary identifies products forum members are talking about, surfaces them in widgets and SEO-friendly lists, and monetizes them with affiliate links.  During our beta, forums saw affiliate revenue increase by as much as 162% without cannibalizing ad revenue.

Here are a few screenshots, along with answers to some frequently-asked questions:

  • Primary Collection
  • Primary product page

1. How will you use my content exactly?

  • We group products into theme-based, SEO-friendly landing pages.
  • We index only snippets of forum posts (never the full post).
  • We display the full text of original posts, and of specific posts that talk about a product (but still only index snippets).
  • We always link back to your forum so you get traffic and backlinks.
  • Visitors to Primary can ask questions, which we post to your forum.
  • We never sell or share your forum or user data.

2. How are you not going to take away my traffic?

  • We optimize SEO for products and themes, not for individual threads or posts.
  • We target search traffic that currently goes to low-quality product sites.
  • Over half of visitors clicks on Primary go back to forums.

3. How will I earn money I’m not already earning now?

  • We earn money through affiliate links, and share the revenue with you.
  • We offer two tools to help you monetize your forum:
    • Primary Explorer is a widget that shows products relevant to a thread or node.  It lets you earn additional revenue and engage drive-by visitors.  You control what it looks like, where it appears, and who sees it.  For instance, you can choose to show it to only logged-out visitors.
    • Threadloom Newsletter now includes an option to automatically insert products into each issue.
  • Primary Explorer forum widget
  • Inserted products in Threadloom Newsletter

In addition to Primary Explorer and Threadloom Newsletter, we are also launching two new features designed to make it easier for Primary visitors to register with your forum and start product discussions.

  • Primary Login (previewed in this blog post): Primary Login is a simple plug-in that lets anyone register and securely log in to your forum or Primary without a password.  Primary Login includes enterprise-grade security from Auth0, and is free for Primary forums.
  • Ask Primary: When a Primary visitor asks a product-related question, we either send the visitor directly to the relevant post on your forum, or automatically post it for them to the appropriate node.  In our beta, each question from Ask Primary generated an average of seven new forum posts.

We’re grateful to customers who gave us valuable feedback during our beta, including Hardline Crawlers, Long Range Hunting, TalkBass, Tesla Motors Club, WDWMAGIC.  Long Range Hunting saw their take-home Amazon affiliate revenue increase by 162%.  TalkBass realized a 12% click-through rate on products inserted in Newsletter, which resulted in a 9% conversion rate on Amazon.  And sessions referred by Primary back to TalkBass had an average duration of over 5 minutes with more than 4 pages per session and a 33% bounce rate.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use Primary to monetize your product discussions, feel free to drop us a line.  If you’re ready to join Primary, you can now sign up directly using this form.  We are currently launching only one forum per vertical, but we plan to expand to multiple forums per vertical later this year, so encourage you to sign up even if your vertical has already been claimed.

We’re excited to grow Primary in 2021, and look forward to building more great products together.

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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