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I often get asked about how to make galleries that will generate a good
income. Although I don't consider myself to be an expert, I will pass on the
knowledge I have gained the hard way, by trial and error.
If you want to make money with your galleries, there are three factors you have to contend with. These are, in order of priority:
This is your first hurdle. If you don't get listed you can't do anything. Most TGPs these days will receive well over 1000 submissions a day, and most will list only 100, may be 200, out of these. So your gallery needs to be in the top 100 to stand any chance. Set yourself a target to be in the top 50. So what makes a good gallery? The following might help. This is also the criteria I use for this TGP.
2. Getting people to click on your sponsor banners If you have been lucky enough to get your gallery listed on a TGP, the next obstacle is to PERSUADE people to visit your sponsors. Remember "persuasion" and NOT "trickery" is the key objective here. I would also recommend that you send your surfers to the sponsor via a full-page ad on your own server. This has several advantages over the normal method of 'handing over' the surfer to your sponsor as soon as they click on the banner. The full-page ad acts as a filter. If the surfer likes what he sees he will continue, if not he will click on the back button and return to your gallery where you can have another go at persuading him to click on a different banner. If you didn't do this you would most likely have lost the surfer to your sponsor whether he was interested in the final product or not. By employing this technique, you are filtering the traffic to your sponsor and as a result your conversion ratio will be a lot better than if you didn't do this. Using a full page ad also hides your sponsor code on your gallery page because the link would look something like: http://yourdomain.com/yoursponsor/index.html Now what sort of click-thru ratio can you expect? This can vary anything between 1 in 100 to 1 in 1000. The factors that will affect this include gallery niche, TGP niche and Sponsor niche. There is no quick and easy way to find which will work best in your case - you just have to get stuck in and find what works by trial and error with different niches and TGPs. Set yourself a target of 1 in 200-300 to start with and then try to refine it to see if you can achieve 1 in 100. That's about the best I have managed with TGP traffic. Remember, no tricks, just persuasion. 3. Converting clicks to cash OK, now assuming you have your galleries listed on TGPs and are sending clicks to your sponsor, when can you expect some $$$$? To begin with, don't calculate your conversions as a ratio of the visitors that click through to your sponsor. As we have discussed above this figure can vary a lot depending on whether the visitor went there voluntarily or whether he was tricked into doing so. The number of unique visitors to your galleries is a more reliable figure to work with. A general rule I have adopted is that you must have at least 100,000 unique visitors (to your gallery) before you can even do any serious calculations. This is the minimum sample size I feel that is required. Set yourself a target of 2 sign ups per 100,000 uniques. That does not necessarily mean that you will get 2 sign ups for EVERY 100,000 uniques you get, but if you take 5 samples (500,000) your target should be around 10 sign ups. If you get more then you have done well. If you get significantly less, ditch your sponsor and try someone else. And no, I am not now going to get you to sign up under me with my sponsors. Just consider this to be my contribution to the community just like others who helped me when I was starting up. Finally, please don't hold me to any of the figures above. If they are way off mark just remember that it is just one person's experience and opinion. Contact: webmaster@sluts-for-you.com |