Tutorial for new submitters : "Why do my TGP ratio's suck?"
 

"Why do my TGP ratio's suck?"

This is a question I hear from a lot of people around the boards, through friends via ICQ and at shows. While a lot of the people who are saying this are new to the game, a few people that I've heard have been around at least a couple years. I'm going to attempt to shed a little light on the subject and help you try to understand why you are seeing poor conversion ratios.

#1. Look at your gallery
This is one of the biggest problems that I see out there. When I have a look at the galleries of some people, I often say out loud, "What the fuck?". Let me start at gallery mistake #1.

- The oversaturation of advertisements
This is a problem that should be so obvious to many, yet it's not. If you have a gallery, there is no need for more than 2 strategically placed ad's. Switch rolls and become the surfer. If you see ad's plastered all over the gallery, you won't think about the content anymore. You'll just think about getting stuck paying for a membership that you probably won't want because of 1 simple fact: The though of paying for porn is more prevalent than the porn itself. Target your ad's, give them a nice teaser and you'll see a better CTR%.

- The poor use of thumbnails
It never has made sense to me, but I see this all the time. If your index.html is the first page that the surfer sees, why not make every thumb crisp, clear, and 1 size? It drives me nuts seeing fuzzy thumbs that are not contrasted properly and unbalanced color wise. It also drives me nuts seeing some thumbs that are 90x120, some that are 100x100, and some that are 137x95. Your thumbnail creator should have an option to make all thumbs a certain uniform size, and should also crop to fit if desired. If you have a sloppy page, you have an uninterested surfer.

- Sell the sex first and membership second!
If you are a surfer and looking for porn, the odds are that you are trying to get your dick hard. Entice them by using some descriptive text about what they are looking at, so that they can make this a personal fantasy. As they get towards the bottom of the page, mention the price point, what bonus sites they will see, and how much/what type of content they will have access to. Remember... Dick hard first... Sell them 2nd. If the surfer knows what's ahead and how much it will cost, he has an urge to buy, thus improving your ratios.

- Make your gallery unique, yet uniform
The template you use will have a lot to do with establishing familiarity with the site you are trying to sell. While you don't need to make a clove of the tour (most TGP's wont list you if this is the case), it is often a good idea to embed a piece of the destination site into your gallery. Be it the logo, phrasing, or a font; prepare them to visit a site that looks familiar after clicking through. Even if they don't join after they click, they will most likely remember the site they visited and they may visit again later. This is beneficial, as most sponsors embed a cookie which will credit you for the sale at a later date.

#2. Optimize your galleries
Without giving away too many tips that will have SEO's ready to slit my throat, do some basic SEO'ing on your galleries. It will take an extra 5 minutes, but the listings will make you smile in the long run. Think of your galleries as mini websites. If you have various sites linking to this 1 page, this will help SE's notice your page a bit, and it'll possible get indexed. Pay attention to the title of your page, descriptive text, relevant meta's, and maybe throw in a couple alt tags on banners. When the gallery traffic dies down, you still may experience some high SE placements for years to come. As some of you may know, the purest traffic is that from the SE's.

#3. Your traffic sources
The TGP game has a changed a lot. With the advent of traffic scripts and skimming, ratios have dropped significantly and surfers have lost trust. The amount of high traffic volume sites has also increased, and this has made data transfer and click throughs soar, while the sales numbers have dropped. If the majority of your submission list is to sites with high skim %'s, high traffic volume numbers, and not a lot of established bookmarked sites with loads of solid SE traffic, you will see low ratios. You may have 250k uniques to the gallery, but if the quality of the surfer isn't high, you may lose more money in bandwidth than you will actually make. Try and add some established sites to your portfolio with no skim and a high number of search engine traffic/bookmarkers.

#4. I'm new?How do I make any $ with this?
If you are new to the TGP game, it's going to be very hard for yourself to get a foot in the door. The first thing you will need to do is gather a large list of tgp's, start submitting galleries, and log who lists you. As you see who is listing you, you can trim your list and spend less time submitting. After you get consistent listings and get a system for yourself, start applying for partner accounts at various sites. Some may have a yearly fee. If you have the means, purchase some submit passes from reputable sites. You will not only benefit from the high quality traffic, but you'll most likely make your money back after the first few galleries. Once you see what works and what doesn't with your galleries, look into purchasing some quality spots from some of the reputable companies selling spots at established websites. I'm sure my man Mark at GTS will help you, and if you are interested in 1 day spots, Parney at Cybercat will be more than happy to lend a hand.
----------------------

There is more to be said about submitting galleries, but you can learn what you need from trial and error, researching on various boards/resource sites. I hope this shed a little light on this subject, and hopefully helped you a bit. Feel free to leave comments, additions or hate below!
:thumbsup

excellent post!

Thanks! :thumbsup

I think I'll occasionally do this. I miss business on GFY.

nice post :thumbsup

I bookmarked this thread what a great read!

Time for a Cigar buddy!

http://www.dereksmout.com/sherm.jpg

Nice Read sherm :thumbsup

I can't get this gallery listed
http://tgp.pornaccess.com/galleries/...stasy/0000074/

Too many people beat me too it when I try to list it.

good stuff
:thumbsup

No wonder those tasted like shit. i forgot to take the plastic off! :1orglaugh

Nice to see a quality business thread once in awhile. Great post :thumbsup

Thanks. :thumbsup

I hope it helps some people.

I guess nobody cares... hahah!

Well.. In case you missed the other 84 threads, Robert Blake wasn't guilty!

Very nice :)

Thread of the day!

Gallery is also squat.

TGP owners dont care how good your gallery looks as long as there is no spyware shit and thier recip is there.

If you submit to a thumb preview, the THUMB MUST BE GOOD
They like prod

nipe pic he he

Nice post. It is rare to see a biz post around here.

nice post...

Gallery is squat? If it's laid out properly and looks clean (even if it's not graphic intensive), it DOES matter. Maybe not to the TGP owner, but the surfer will react differently. Compare a clean gallery next to an unorganized gallery and you will see which the surfer will be attracted to.

This post is about conversion ratio's my friend. Not listings and how you are placed.

100% tru^ U have to have a gallery that appeals to surfers...shitty pics scattered everywhere with 2 links wont do anything for you conversion wise.

Very nice post man, this is uncommon at gfy...

:thumbsup

i agree!!!!! very nice to see a nice post like this! Respect! :thumbsup :thumbsup :thumbsup

thank you very much for this

Nice thread man :thumbsup

Does Halcyon run thread of the week anymore? If so I vote for this thread :)

Nice!

But I take exception to this:

"As some of you may know, the purest traffic is that from the SE's."

Type-ins is the keyword here, inho.

Cheers for the post!

Sell the sex first and the membership second...

This is the only part that I have a minor difficulty with. Otherwise a fantastic post.

The difficulty is that I find I do better with sell the sex galleries. I mean galleries that don't actually mention priceline content, etc. I've been thinking that it is better to let the tour sell the site. It's my job to get the dick as hard as possible.

I agree though that very few things kill a gallery more than a priceline in the first link.

Excellent info, thanks much.

great post, but I take issue with this
you can't just put up 12-15 pics and 2 banners and pray someone clicks, you need to get them excited to click, you want them to click without even giving a fuck what kind of thumbs you have on your page.

I've been doing a lot of gay galleries lately and am finding that using a great sales pitch with so-so pics (no cumshots and no more than a picture of two of any sort of penetration) is greatly improving my ratios. I mainly have a lot of tease pics (grabbing of the crotch and cock right near the mouth, yet no contact. That anticipation, make them click to the sponsor to see that. THAT is what gets them hard. If you give them 12-15 pictures of explicit hardcore and cumshots, you're giving them everything for free when you should be teasing it harder.

You know when ratios really went into the shitter? When TGP's stopped allowing the pictures on full html pages...I had nearly DOUBLE sales when I was allowed to do that. THAT will sell a surfer...a big picture on an html page with a text link below that says "Click here to see this full set and many more just like it"

I stand corrected. :thumbsup

We may have confused each other. :1orglaugh

I'm all about selecting images that don't give away the site.. I'm also about putting up more than pictures and banners. It's text that will intice them to click further that they need, but this isn't necessarilly 5 text links to the sites and 5 banners. this can be done with non linking text, a header and a footer (for example).

IMO, it is a very saturated time in the gallery submitting biz.
Most tgps are going towards paid/hosted gals and very few new comers are getting partner accounts.

The original points are definately true, however the main reason is that there are simply too many galleries out there.

True, but this is assuming you are in the gallery game and building traffic. If you are, then these tips should help conversions. :thumbsup

Very cool post :)

true
but I still want my surfer thinking more about the site he's going to visit when he clicks one of my links rather than even care about any pictures I have on my page...which is where I think we got confused and may have confused a newbie to the TGP game...

one of my best all time gallery building styles (back in the day)
banner
2 pics
text link
3 pics
banner
3 pics
text link
2 pics
"Next Gallery" link

and all images on html pages

of course that wouldn't fly these days ;-)

ah, the things that used to make money and still could if they were allowed....

actually, this is what I'm doing with my new TGP...all hosted galleries and my own galleries with pictures on html pages :)

i wasnt in this biz back then, sounds very nice.... now its 2 banners/links tops! i think 3 banners would be a better general rule: That way u can make a nice linked header, pics, link, pics, link.
Now when i design a nice header i have to leave it non linked for the other 2 links :mad:

Great post Sherm!

:thumbsup

nice post bro

Lemme know when it's up. We can trade some traffic. :thumbsup

I'd be interested to see if that format still converts well for you.

Great Thread, and I agree on everything, but as a side not I'd like to mention that it's also very important to build a connection between the content that is shown on the gallery and the one that is shown on the tour.
I think many surfers click through to the tour cause they like the girl (or the scene) on the gallery, so you should ensure that he also sees the same girl on the tour again, to make him confident that he'll see more of her after he had joined.

greath post :thumbsup

All I can say about gallery submitting is that I'm glad I got into paid listings when I did. There's nothing but crumbs left for gallery submitters for the most part.

There are a select few with the right contacts that can make a good bit of $$ with submissions, but for the most part its nothing but crumbs.


I didn't read the whole post....you lost me by telling me different size thumbs are bad.....that's completely false.

Hi Serm....great post.

Give us a gallery critique please. What changes can we make to make it better? We seem to ne something right since thehun & pinkworld lists everything we send them as well as 30 other tgp partner accounts. Just want to make it better :)

http://www.camcutie.com/tgp/031605/031605_thehun.htm

XOXOXO
*Krystal*