If you close your eyes and listen quietly you can hear the anguished cries of gallery builders across the globe:
"Why won’t the Hun list me"?
Thumbnail Gallery Post owners are mysterious beasts. No two are alike yet they are all the same. Each one has their own rules for submission and TGPs are the lifelines for countless adult webmasters. For those who make their money from marketing techniques applied to gallery pages, TGP listing is everything.
A good listing from one of the major TGPs can result in up to one hundred thousand hits to your gallery page. There is no other source of such stupendous traffic for the average webmaster. To get those kind of hits one has to buy banner ads on Yahoo and network television or be Playboy.
The only obstacles to obtaining this amazing promotion are the whims and quirks of the TGP owners you submit galleries to.
If you’ve built and submitted a few galleries you know that getting listed isn’t as easy as it sounds in theory. One TGP doesn’t want reciprocal buttons but ten others do. As each year passes we see TGP owners decreasing the amount of ad banners or text links allowed on a listed gallery. They don’t want pop-ups or consoles or even JavaScript page enhancements to appear on a submitter’s gallery.
Some don’t care who you are while most others won’t accept submissions from webmasters who provide a free webmail account in their contact info. One TGP will reject your host while another will reject you because they don’t like the sponsor your gallery promotes. TGP reviewers want you to include high-quality images on your page but penalize you if your gallery loads slowly.
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It’s impossible to list the idiosyncrasies of each TGP reviewer/site owner. They each are pretty good about posting their rules on their individual submission pages. There are however, some common rules you should adhere to if you want to be listed by any TGP.
Most TGPs want your gallery to include at least ten thumbnails that when clicked will open to a full-sized image by itself and not on an individual HTML page. Some TGPs will require your gallery to include as many as 20 images. Video clip galleries tend to be listed if they include four or more thumbnails to movies of around 300kb each. Reading the submission rules of a TGP will tell you the amount of images/clips that are preferred for listing.
Be consistent with your contact information. If you need to set up an email account solely for gallery business, do so. Give the same name or nickname with each submission. Supply the URL to a main web site if asked for on a TGP submission form. The more a reviewer sees the same good galleries from the same webmaster, the more likely they are to look favorably on you.
TGPs will often email a reply-to link that must be clicked on in order to confirm your gallery submission. Try not to use a web-based or free email account in your contact information. TGP webmaster’s feel those who use such services use them to abuse the gallery game.
A customary practice in TGP submission is the reciprocal link. You post a text or button graphic link to the TGP you submit your gallery to on your page. The belief is that the webmaster who applies TGP recips to their galleries will obtain higher listings.
Most TGPs want to see no more than three reciprocal buttons/text links on any single gallery page. Some TGP rules will state that you must include two other buttons/links to two other TGP sites in your recip area. This makes for the tedious task of creating several different versions of the same gallery with multiple recips for the hundreds of different TGPs.
There is software to manage the task of multi-recips. You should also look for TGPs that list submissions of CLEAN galleries. A clean gallery is one that does not contain TGP reciprocal links. Thoroughly read the rules on reciprocal linking at each TGP you submit to.
The above are just some of the considerations that go through the Mind of a Thumbnail Gallery Post owner or reviewer. In our next lesson, we’ll delve farther into the mind of the TGP owner. Read submission rules, follow them and consider the points made in this lesson.