You build a gallery. You submit it to all the TGPs. You receive an email that says your gallery has been accepted at the biggest; most visited TGP on the net. Lucky you.
The hits come rolling in. In one day, your gallery has generated 75,000 unique visits to your site. This is the best day you've ever had!
Then you check your sponsor stats:
1,253 surfers clicked on your banner and you got only one sign-up. That $35.00 you made won't even pay for the bandwidth cost all that TGP traffic caused.
What did you do wrong? Was it the banner? The sponsor? Are you just an idiot that has no place in the Adult Internet?
The problem isn't with you. This problem is your traffic.
The typical TGP surfer is a savvy surfer. The main reason they visit a Thumbnail Gallery Post is because they know a TGP has what they want: free porn. When you consider that you got one of 75,000 freeloaders to let go of their cock and actually spend a little money, you should realize that your marketing skills are just fine. In the numbers game of gallery building and submitting, one sign-up out of 1,253 clicks is pretty much the norm.
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"The search engine user is searching. When they type their special keywords in the box, they will get results. They will visit those sites and be influenced by the marketing within." |
Gallery geeks will tell you to build and submit several galleries every day and the numbers will catch up with you. They will recommend gallery generators and auto-submitters. Soon, you'll be spending 18 hours out of a day on a venture that was supposed to free you from all the stress and silliness of the 9-5 world. You lose out on family and friends and sunshine because you have to work like a dog everyday so you can get your lousy three sign-ups. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine why anyone on earth would choose to work that much for so little in return.
There is an answer to this madness: Search Engines. Build an actual, whole site with a theme and sponsors to match and submit that site to search engines. Why? Search engine traffic is better traffic.
A search engine user is either one of those golden and diminishing Internet newbies who don't know where the free stuff is yet, or they are the surfer that has found the little bytes of booty that TGPs offer isn't enough anymore. The search engine user is searching. When they type their special keywords in the box, they will get results. They will visit those sites and be influenced by the marketing within.
The analogy is this: If you had a brick-and-mortar shop, the TGP surfers would be those folks that stand outside and simply look at the display in your window. A search engine user is the customer that actually walks inside your store.
How do you get listed on a search engine?
Well this is no magic formula, but there are definite steps you can take (when building your site) that will increase your listing chances greatly.
Use Meta tags. Insert keywords in them that fit your content. Think of every word that a surfer might type in when looking for your brand of content. Many search engines use robots that spider all the words in your head tags. Since Meta tags reside in the head of your page, this will be the first place a robot will look.
Instead of wasting space and valuable download time with a fancy image logo, use bold text with the name of your site. The same robots and spiders that read your Meta tags will then go to the first thing on your page. If that first thing is an image, then you might lose out on being indexed.
Always put text in the "alt" tag of every image. I cannot stress enough that bots, crawlers and spiders look at all the text on your page and index your site from these words. There are beta image crawlers being used right now on search engines but how do you think those image crawlers find those images? They look at the name of image and it's "alt" tags.
Once you have done the above, it's time to submit to the search engines.
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When it comes to SE's, there are basically two types: Search engines use robot programs that search your site for text. Directories are mostly managed by human editors that look at your site and either list you or delete you.
The very first and most important place you should submit your site to is DMOZ (http://dmoz.org).
DMOZ is the Open Directory Project. It is the brainchild of Netscape. While the average surfer may not use DMOZ as their main search tool, the benefit of getting your site listed on DMOZ is gargantuan. Many major search sites use and rely on the data from DMOZ to give a searcher results. Some of the search sites that use DMOZ are: Ask Jeeves, AT&T Worldnet, Google, Info Space, Netscape Search and a little place that is the homepage of approximately 30 million people: AOL.
Here are the steps to submit your site to DMOZ:
Click on the "Society" category. When the next page comes up, click on the "Sexuality" sub-category. After that links loads, click on the "Adult" sub-category that will be down on the page under the "See also" heading. Then click on the appropriate sub category from the list for your content. Another page will load that defines content even more. For instance, if you clicked on the "Image Galleries" link, you would then click on the "Amateurs" link if you have an amateur site. From that link, you will be able to click on "Free", "AVS" or "Members" link depending on your site. You will want to categorize your site from there to at least one more sub-category such as "Interracial" if your site is an interracial one.
When you get to this point, this is where you scroll up to the top of the page and click on the "add URL" link. Read the rules. Fill out the form and hit the "submit" button.
You have just submitted your site to DMOZ.
There are hundreds of other search sites you can submit to. DMOZ is the first and most important web directory you should start with.
With good search engine listings, you will find your site gets seen by better and more open customers. You will find your sign-ups increasing because you have a higher-quality traffic base.