One of the first questions newbies have when they enter the adult world, right after what sort of site they should start, is where to get their traffic from. There are a lot of ways to generate the hits they need to get started - link and banner trades, paid advertising, search engines, paid placement engines and TGPs.
TGPs have been getting slammed a lot lately for a number of reasons. Many people are angry at them for providing so much free porn that they are having trouble getting surfers to sign up for their sites. Others are mad at them for not listing their galleries, or for not allowing them to use auto submission software, or for their rules about reciprocal links.
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"...make sure that you are not running the same group of people through your site..." |
Lastly, there is a group with a love/hate relationship with the TGP sites. These are the ones that build gallery after gallery and post to a variety of TGPs very diligently, generating a steady traffic stream that can reach into the tens of thousands of uniques a day. While they love the traffic volume, they hate the quality because they are having trouble converting it.
You cannot blame the TGP for the lack of conversions, it is up to you and your site to make the surfer pull out their credit card when they get to your site. Yes, the TGPs are creating a major appetite among surfers for free porn, but you the webmaster are contributing to this by building and submitting your galleries. You are giving your content to them, but you are not giving it for free, you are asking for and receiving something in return. What is that? Traffic.
So often I hear people saying that they have recently started submitting their galleries to this TGP site or that TGP site and that while they are getting the tons of hits they want, they just can't seem get any of these surfers to click on any of their banners. Even if they do get the clicks, they are not signing up for the site, not even for low price trials. I have heard complaints of banner click-thrus in the 1:10,000 range or worse. And then the signup conversions after the banner clicks are almost as bad.
The best way to increase conversions is to target your galleries to specific niches and their associated TGPs. There are TGP sites for anything you can think of, from teens to boobs to oral to anal to leather to bubbles and smoking. Your job is to find every similarly themed TGP out there and submit to them continuously. You will find not better audience than those looking for exactly what you are selling, and the more specific and targeted it is, the better your conversions should be.
Simply by targeting the smaller TGPs, the quality of traffic you will get will be much higher, though the volume may not be there. They may send a small amount of traffic each, but if there are enough of them, all of those small amounts start to add up to significant numbers. And even if they don't add up to all that much, would you rather get 10 signups from 1,000,000 clicks or from 100? I would take the 100 clicks and the lower bandwidth costs, thank you very much, since my cost per acquisition just went way down.
Another way to help with conversions is to make sure that you are not running the same group of people through your site, over and over. They will get used to your banners and will become immune to them, just wanting to see the next gallery you build. Thus, you will want to vary your traffic. Don't post to just one TGP all the time, since they likely have a fairly loyal set of users and they will quickly get used to your galleries and your banners. Make sure to spread your message over as many sites as possible so that your content and advertising do not get stale.
So, how are you going to submit all of you galleries to all of these TGPs? Well, there are a number of ways. If you are just going to go after the big ones, then you can easily do it all by hand. There just aren't that many really big TGP sites, maybe 10 that you would want to concentrate on. Since most of the big ones will not work with auto submission software, you are likely better off doing the big ones manually.
If you want to go beyond the top 10 big TGP sites and hit as many as you can, then hand submit the large ones and use software to auto submit to all the smaller ones. There is probably somewhere between 1,000-2,000 smaller TGP sites, so the time it would take to hand-submit to them all is basically impossible. Some of the good auto submission software includes Russian Submitter, LinkUP Pro and Wolf Submit. This takes care of most of the TGPs, but most of these will be general sites that might not have the targeting you want.
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To find a good list of various niche-specific TGP sites, try going to AdultMarketers.com, where they have a rather comprehensive list to suit all fetishes. It is run by BossHawg, so you know it is a good spot that is going to help you. While you have to register for it, it will give you the ability to create your own custom list of TGP sites, picposts and more. You can log in and do your targeted submission right from there each day.
Now, you are going to need a lot of galleries for all of these different TGP sites, right? Not really, all you have to do is make one. Build a good gallery with good content, add a recip for one TGP and then just clone the gallery and drop the new recip in and you now have another gallery. Keep repeating this and soon you will have all the galleries you need. Building just one gallery can easily yield another hundred and more, all with their own recip links. It is easy to do when you only have to change one graphic for each page.
Also, make sure to consider the new TGP2 sites. These are very similar to the standard TGP sites except that they use only 5 pictures per gallery and they are a lot less explicit. The point here is to give just a little, a tease, to try to encourage the user to sign up to see more. Most normal TGP galleries pretty much give enough for the user to get off, but the TGP2 tries to do just the opposite. Give just enough to get the interest, but no more. And the best thing is, take a 20-picture TGP gallery and it can easily be turned into 4-5 TGP2 galleries, without a ton of work. Something to keep in mind.
Lastly, another good way to get traffic volume from a TGP (though not quality) is to use blind links. But, be very careful with this method. Some TGPs allow and some do not. Make sure to read their rules VERY carefully before doing anything like this. I know many TGPs do it with each other, they have what appear to be gallery links, but they just take you to another TGP.
When I was a surfer, I personally hated that. But, it can work. Make sure to be nice to your surfers, though. If the TGP wants a minimum of 20 pics, then give 20 real pix and drop an extra 4-5 thumbs you can use for blind links. Again, this is somewhat underhanded, but if can help you get the clicks and the conversions. If the surfer wants to see teen anal bad enough and they click the link to what they think is a teen anal gallery, when they land on the teen anal paysite, they just might decide to pay to join it, if it looks like it has content that they want.
After a while, you will start to see what TGP sites send the best traffic to you and your site(s). Once you start to see the trends, start concentrating your time on the best-performing TGPs only. You are also going to want to make a whole bunch of different banners and buttons for your site, to put on your galleries.
You are looking for trends here as well. If you rotate ten or so banners through your galleries, you will start to see which get more clicks than others. Again, concentrate only on the banners that work.
Once you have a good idea of what TGPs send the best traffic and what banners get the most clicks, you should hopefully start to see the signups and the conversion rates rise. And isn't that the whole point of posting to TGPs?