I've just finished doing my TGP reviews for the day and I have to say that I am left wondering whether some webmasters really want to make sales or not. Making sales is becoming harder with every passing month and the cost of making sales is increasing.

"Free sites and galleries are not meant to entertain the surfer; they are meant to encourage the surfer to click through to the sponsor..."

Not that long ago, the cost of making a sale was limited to bandwidth, content and the time it took to make a gallery but these days additional costs are starting to appear. In the past TGP traffic was almost limitless and virtually free but today we are starting to see that traffic dry up as more and more TGP owners realise that they have a profitable commodity in the traffic that they control.

Several years ago traffic brokers, webmasters who controlled the flow of traffic, were scarcely a blip on the radar screen. Today if you are serious about making money from building TGP galleries then working with a traffic broker has got to be factored into your business plan.

That has come about because many big TGP owners now sell their traffic directly to traffic brokers. Instead of submitting your sites to the TGP and receiving your hits for free you now have to submit your gallery to the traffic broker and pay him the required fee for the amount of traffic you want to receive.

You may not think so but that arrangement definitely has some advantages. When you submit your gallery to a TGP for free there is no guarantee that you will receive any traffic. The TGP may or may not list you but even if your gallery is listed there is no certainty that you will attract any surfers to look at your gallery.

However, when you submit your gallery to a traffic broker and pay for a certain number of hits you usually do receive the number of hits that you have paid for. Obviously some traffic brokers provide better traffic than others; it all depends on their filtering systems.

Regardless of the quality of the traffic, you still have to pay for it and that is one more cost of doing business and making sales in this industry. It is however, a cost that more and more people are accepting.

It is also a cost that many people are questioning. Just recently people who have bought some but made no sales have brought the quality of traffic from several brokers into question. Obviously when there are no sales the knees jerk and the first thing that is blamed is the traffic.

Now I'm not here to defend the traffic brokers, there are enough webmasters out there who make nice profits from bought traffic who can defend them just as well as me. What I really want to suggest is that the problem usually isn't with the traffic from the traffic broker but with the design of the gallery that the traffic is being bought for.

Without giving you a URL let me describe a gallery that I reviewed today. It consisted of 10 thumbs, 1 movie clip, a very small amount of text that did nothing to sell the site and a graphic that was a very weak attempt at making a banner. The whole lot was encased in what looked like a fancy gold frame and it obviously took the builder quite some to construct.

Its chances of making a sale are about zero simply because there is nothing on that site, other than the thumbs and the movie link that looks even vaguely like a link through to the sponsor. The gallery may look really pretty but without a call to the surfer to "Click HERE" the gallery is missing the point.

As I have said many times before, free sites and galleries are not meant to entertain the surfer; they are meant to encourage the surfer to click through to the sponsor to see more. Most surfers don't spend long periods of time pouring over every image and every word on a gallery. They zoom in looking for hardcore porn, then spot a few interesting thumbs and click on them and then they are off to the next gallery.

That means that you have a short period of time to grab their attention and you have to use techniques that will subconsciously tell the surfer that here is a link to the sponsor that should be clicked.

Now mastering those techniques may sound rather difficult but nothing is further from the truth. The quickest way to show a surfer that something is a link is to tell him it is and the way to do that is allow the browser to display it as a link. It may be trendy to remove the underlining from text links but it will decrease your chances of having that link clicked because some surfers won't recognise it as a link.

Another simple way to make your links stand out so that the surfer will see them is to put them in nice big text using colors that will contrast with the rest of the page. Sometimes it's hard to find a color that will contrast and if that is the case then put the text in a table cell that has the background color set to something that will contrast with the rest of the page.

Be sure that your text links are encouraging and excite the surfer to want to click on the link. Simply putting the sponsor site's name as a text link is not going to cut it and describing it in terms that you might find in a solicitor's box won't do the trick either. You have to make it sound exciting and just like the sort of thing that the surfer is looking for.

If you are going to use a banner then make sure that it looks like a banner and not just some more decoration. Use banners that look interesting and inviting and that contrast vividly with the rest of the page. There is no rocket science in any of the things that I have just mentioned; it's all just common sense.

Sadly more and more new webmasters seem to be lacking in that and they think that pretty galleries sell. That sort of design might be well and good when you are getting your traffic for free but when you're paying cold hard cash for it - you need to have a gallery that will sell...Period!