John Horton

Only a few years ago I could not find a way to do this. Now I see a number of user-friendly software solutions. Silly me. I will report back when I work it all out.

@JoelR I think you are right. This might be more doable than I thought.

The fact that you have not heard of IPS Live Topics says a lot about how hot or not the product is. It is a IPS specific tool that merges a YouTube live stream with a live chat. It makes sense for a produced live stream like a product demo. If it used Zoom it would be awesome for podcast interviews. Because it only uses YouTube live stream it would require a bit of production to use for a remote interview. I am asking in the hope that I misunderstand or that there is a workaround.

@JoelR I really wish I could have gotten SendGrid to work. IDK what I was do doing wrong. As far as only using current members' emails, I want to do the opposite. I am looking to bring back old members who have not visited in a long time.

@Nomad My list is 100% from user accounts in my forum. I have run my site since 2008 so I have been growing the list for a long time. As my forum subject is obscure I believe my list is very high quality. In other words, someone would have to be legitimately interested in my small niche to register for my site. I do not sell anything to my readers so I do not have a conversion rate. My business is all ad sales.

Well, this is a hot topic for me this week. I have more questions than answers. Most of the time I do this for clients. I charge $500 per mail campaign. I think this is dirt cheap. I have 8k addresses in IPS database and 6.5k in MailChimp. These are the same users but the Mailchimp data has bounces and unsubs weeded out. I did a mail push this week straight from the default IPS bulk mail tool. The problem is I have no idea of the open rate or delivery rate of the emails. It is a black hole. Hell, it might have been great. I did get a result for the campaign I was promoting but maybe all that traffic was organic. The report says 600 clicks. Is that opens or clicks on the link in the mail? I tried to config SendGrid. Could not get it to work. The support guys at IPS tried to help but suspect I did something wrong when I autogenerated the DNS settings I sent in. As is my usual issue with IPS the one thing that is lacking is good documentation.

I am looking for successful use cases for Live Topics. I have some ideas on how it could be used if it streamed Zoom but it only streams YouTube. If it worked with Zoom I can see hosting an interview and then fielding questions from the public. None of this would be a problem if my interview subjects were local. Not the case and that is why I need Zoom. Sure, I could have a celebrity stream themselves and them take questions but the odds of technical failure are too large.

I have been trying to get my SendGrid - Sender Authentication DNS settings for my cloud account set for a week now. Pretty sure I am driving the support guys at IPS crazy. Likely I am doing something wrong and have no idea. Anyhow... I was under the impression that using a service like SendGrid would substantially increase my deliverability vs emailing from the default IPS mail tool. Is that right? Do any of you do an occasional Newsletter or mass mailing from the stock IPS mail tool? My mailing list is a mostly untapped resource.

I watched a couple of the version 5 videos and I don't really know what there is to be super excited about. Yes, the UI is fresh and for all I know the underlying code some sort of improvement. It's got some whiz bang features but I'm having trouble seeing how they're going to grow traffic. At the end of the day it is a message board/ web forum. How sexy can it be? The current version is stable, quite good form my perspective and my readers get what they're looking for. So what is the compelling reason to endure the upgrade?

what you guys are telling me is what I had long suspected. thanks

FYI - I understand what they do but do not see the great value especially if the users are setting the tags.

When I moved to IPS about a year ago I did not give Prefixes and Tags a lot of thought. I guess I do not understand what I am missing. Any wisdom?

@JoelR If it would meaningfully grow traffic then yes. From a pure business perspective, how do you quantify that? My forum & site is the only the active site in my niche except whatever happens at Facebook and I am a known personality in my arena. When I personally create more videos and content for the site it is obviously good for the site but I can not see an impact in traffic data. The same is true when elite athletes in the sport post. I am in a very small niche so maybe I have a different reality. I can see how a a bigger site might spend some percentage of revenue for good content. I think this only makes sense if the site were new or the business was big enough to budget for it. If I forked out $500 a month for paid content the ROI would be in the negative.

I have watched the traffic on my site become more and more mobile over the years. 15 years ago it was more than 75% desktop. Today is more like 60% mobile. Since I am banner ad dependent my most expensive ads are placed for mobile.

maybe my site is small ball but I can not imagine the the ROI of paying for forum content. To be helpful it would have to be high-quality content and that is not going to be cheap. I assume the desired effect is more traffic. What is the acceptable cost metric for additional traffic?