Chances are if you're a newbie webmaster, you're going to build and submit Thumbnail Galleries. Some of you will hate it. Some of you will love it. Some of you will fail miserably. Some of you will discover a career. Some of you will aim too high.

"These neophytes get caught up in the chase. They become obsessed with being listed as opposed to making money.."

Gallery building is an art many will never master. We all have our particular talents. Most of us take the gallery route because it's the quickest way to get lots of traffic to our domains. Everyone wants plentiful traffic because the odds of selling increase with each surfer. There are other ways to bring gobs of hits to a site but nothing rocks the traffic continuum quite like a good listing on a busy TGP.

We are at an amazing time in the history of commerce. With a website, one single merchant can house and serve tens, even hundreds of thousands of customers in a day. Before the Internet, mega-corporations were the only ones able to handle such a massive influx of shoppers and only through a network of franchises, warehouses and phone banks. Now, all it takes to handle that kind of business is a decent hosting account.

The newbie webmaster decides to build TGP galleries because that's where the fast and plentiful traffic is.

There is nothing wrong with this line of thinking. It's true. If you build a decent gallery and follow all the rules, your page could be listed on The Hun or Elephant List or even both. If so, your gallery will positively receive tens of thousands of unique visitors. You'll have perverts from all over the country and all over the world, all over your little gallery.

They'll be downloading each and every full-size image and thumbnail and decorative graphic. They might even click your sponsor banners. They'll be returning and returning if your pics are any good and guess what? Odds are that 97% of them will not pay for a damned thing.

If you want to be a long-term gallery webmaster, you have to pace yourself through the learning process. This is hands-on training and the only way to learn is by trial and error. First, you learn the art of gallery building. Then you learn the art of gallery submitting -and the only way is the hard way.

The beginning of the hard way comes with the experience of creating galleries and having them rejected by TGPs. TGP reviewers are busy as hell. Each TGP demands obedience to a laundry list of rules in order to be listed. Forget about pleasing the surfer. You won't go anywhere in the gallery game if you can't please the TGP reviewers. This is where many TGP novices lose their perspective. These neophytes get caught up in the chase. They become obsessed with being listed as opposed to making money.

As a result, other newbies begin to believe they must only submit to the biggest, busiest TGPs. This is a mistaken belief. Being listed on the Hun won't make you a better gallery maker. Fifty thousand hits from Richard's Realm will make you wiser about transfer limits but it won't teach you a thing about how to make money with your gallery. You know what you learn when Persian Kitty accepts one of your thumbnail pages? You learn what you knew all along. TGP galleries accumulate a buttload of hits. Most of those hits are unproductive unless you know how to make more than just the TGP reviewer happy.

We're not advising you to aim low. We're advising you to go slow with this TGP thing. Don't sabotage your efforts by blowing your bandwidth.

Before you go submitting to the big guys, try the medium and little guys. There are hundreds and hundreds of smaller TGPs you can submit to. They won't send your gallery the mondo hits but maybe you don't need the mondo hits. Maybe you're not ready for masses of traffic. Maybe you need to learn that getting listed is only half the equation for gallery success.

Your aim is to make money. If you get a listing on a major TGP and sell nothing you're out both money and time. Why not try a steadier route where you can learn without killing your finances? Why not hedge your bets by taking it slowly? Why not approach smaller TGPs first?