Steve

Something has been bothering me, and I want to know if it bothers anyone else (specifically those who make use of sponsor hosted galleries).

Why is it that many sponsors have extremely shitty hosted galleries? Or, even worse, a long, complicated process that has you click thru several pages of options - only to reward you with an extremely shitty hosted gallery link.

What's up with that? They must have seen somebody's hosted gallery and said, "we need to get our affiliates hooked up and pick up some more joins, too." So why make it a waste of time, and resources?

Here are some friendly suggestions for any sponsor who is considering whether to offer FHGs, or is unhappy with the performance of his program's FHGs:

1) Hire a professional to bang out a bunch of templates.
Yeah, Bobby from the mailroom might surf a TGP, but chances are, you shouldn't entrust your business to him. Shake a tree, and it's raining gallery designers. Pick a few, place an order of 5+ wth each, and have Bobby start selecting the images to plug into the templates. Why so many galleries? 30 days in a month, and the more FHGs you offer, the more spots you can suck up on a TGP. And you'll be able to see which gallery designers are worth the money. If a guy builds a gallery that converts like shit, don't use him again. Go give that tree another shake.

2) Make the FHGs easy for your affiliates to use.
This is simple. DON'T make me click thru page after page of options. I want to log in, click the FHG link, and see a nice big list of URLs. If you want to offer a chioice of color options, that's nice - but have them already built and hosted - just say "/grn/01/lihwh/?ACCOUNT is the green background, while /blk/01/lihwh/?ACCOUNT is the black background." See? Simple. K.I.S.S.

3) Make the FHGs series galleries.
Surf a TGP. How many galleries will you find that have 15 assorted pics? Or 3 pics of 5 different series mixed together?
Few, if any. So why would a sponsor only offer me this stuff on their FHG? I don't know. I thought they wanted to make money. I guess they just wanted to give Bobby something to do.

4) Make the URL of the gallery static.
Some sponsors have really nice FHGs, that convert great. But, they use some kind of linking format that makes it almost impossible to submit the FHG into your own admin script. Why? Because the gallery link is actually a re-direct. So, your TGP admin script cannot find any content (even if you have an admin account that is allowed to break your submit rules, it needs to find the content).

5) Don't re-direct traffic or pop consoles on a FHG
This is pretty simple. I'm all for doing this on the tour - I have no problem with that. But, a gallery link is different. You either do it right, or you don't. Guys that don't, tend to pull this stuff. Not everyone has scripts that easily allow you to disable/delete a sponsor's galleries from their rotation. I know it's hard to break old habits, but this is a horse of a different color. I'm sure you can find extremly affordable hosting for your FHGs - and if they are done right, you won't even dream of messing with them. A good gallery design should more than pay for any bandwidth bills from non-converting foreign freeloaders.

6) Grab some domains to use for your FHG project
If you have your program on abcefg.com, it would be a really smart move NOT to put the FHGs on abcdefg.com/fgh/. Domains are really cheap, and so is hosting. Even a small time operator can afford to break this up. It's also a safeguard, too. Imagine your FHG project is SO successful that your server is overloaded - you wouldn't want your tour to crawl in real slow, would you? It's never a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket, anyway. There are plenty of hosting companies out there. You might even wind up with a new coffee mug, or pen!

Now, I'm sure there will be those who read this and say "fuck this lazy bastard! I offer a FHG and this ungrateful shithead bitches and moans?" Sorry if you think that way. I'm really not looking to burn anyone, and I haven't mentioned any program in this post. I'm just giving you a friendly suggestion. Because in 6-12 months, you can pretty much forget about getting a significant amount of TGP traffic from anyone but TGP owners. It's taken longer than I thought, but TGP is going the way of TGP2 - in the sense that more and more of the gallery spots belong to the TGP owner. There are already several TGP admin scripts available for purchase that have rotation features for FHGs built into them, as well as several other scripts that can handle the rotation of FHGs, and then insert them into your TGP pages for you. That guy in your program, the one that does good off TGP listings? Pretty soon, he's either buying spots, shut out, or only listed by newbies, or a handful of sites. You better plan on going right to the traffic source. And when you do, please do it right.