Make the ultimate site...a site that you would visit on a regular basis. Consistent updates, easy to navigate, hot clean content/galleries, hottest galleries top of the list, easy to remember or bookmark, and don't worry about making money off it to start. Just concentrate on gaining bookmarkers and growing traffic. Money will come with the hits. Keep it simple. No consoles. Feel it out as you go..try to get the surfer's idea of what the site is and work with it to make money. From our experience, niche TGP's in general seem to be easier to grow, and easier to make money on than general. I'm sure other experiences differ.
Submit galleries to big tgps with yours and their recips, and no sponsors at first. Just get some recognition and some hits. Yeah, it costs money to do that, but that's an investment in your future traffic. Make sure your site is looking great and updated all the time. Build a couple cookie cutter free sites in your niche, and submit them to all the link sites. Be looking through the counters to find sites in your niche and hit range that are trading traffic as you grow. Try to exchange traffic with sites that aren't as good as yours. That way you have the upper hand on the link trade. You're more likely to keep their bookmarker then them to keep yours. Don't trade hits with CJ sites if you're working on bookmarkers.
Might sound crazy, but if you follow that, you'll have 70,000 uniques a day to play around with in 2 months, and you'll know how to do it 100 times over.
Hope that helps,
loster
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