Thumbnail Gallery Posts (AKA TGPs) have always been a popular way to get free or at least inexpensive advertising–as there are paid TGPs out there. TGPs are sites which allow you to post a sample gallery of pictures along with a link to your site. Surfers will then look at your samples, hopefully click through to your site for more information, and hopefully join your site.
There are many TGP sites where you can post your pictures, but an example of a good TGP site would be The Hun. What makes them good? Many TGP sites are fully automated accepting crap galleries, while The Hun manually checks each gallery before they are posted to assure they meet the quality he’s looking for. That’s important as surfers know they can get quality galleries there, so surfers will return time after time. As a result, The Hun is a very popular site with lots of traffic, and a listing at The Hun will guarantee lots of traffic to your site and a few signups if you have decent and unique content.
I hear webmasters complaining often about how difficult to get listed at The Hun. I get about 99% of my galleries I post listed as the simple secrete is unique and quality content. I shoot all my own content, so it’s obviously unique were as many other webmasters buy their content which has been sold many times to others and already posted. So, unique and quality will get you posted, and that’s also the same secret for having a successful website and worthy of it’s own post so I’ll cover that another day.
Many webmasters claim to be able to get between 15-30 signups for each Hun listing! That’s not bad for a few minutes work. From our own studies a few years ago, we knew we could expect about 5 signups per post. Yet, it took a lot of traffic to generate that as you must realize that surfers at TGP sites are there for FREE content, so your content must be compelling to convince them to part with their money. I hear webmasters claiming their content converts at rates of 1 in 20 and even much less than that, and that certainly would depend upon where the traffic was coming from. We’ve achienved results of 1 in 5 before but that was very specific traffic from a link we have inside the membership section of another site, so understand all this when hearing webmasters throwing around outrageous conversion rates to get you excited–where was that traffic coming from?
From our Hun experience we would expect that most people viewing the gallery would never click to the site for more information. They’d just suck down our bandwidth and move on to another free gallery. That’s important, as before even thinking about posting to The Hun, make sure you have a good server and lost of bandwidth as our very first posts to The Hun years ago resulted in our server going down each time a gallery was posted! We’ve since solved that with overkill servers designed to handle way beyond what we are using them for.
A very small percentage of the people viewing your TGP will click through to your site. Of those coming from a TGP like The Hun, about 1 in 800 would join. We found this number to vary depending upon niche and TGP with the 1 in 800 being on the bad side so you’ll have a more realistic view instead of an exaggerated one. Doesn’t sound like much, but if you throw enough traffic through you’ll end up making a good amount and more importantly, The Hun is free!
Your results will vary. I’m just quoting what “we” experienced. Many webmasters will surely claim much better results and I welcome your specific results on this. Either way though, TGPs are clearly a good advertising tool.
A few things to understand. Different TGPs have different rules so make sure to READ their rules otherwise you’ll just end up pissing of the webmaster of the TGP and getting banned. Most will require between 10-20 sample pictures, thus why I usually post 15 as that’s right in the middle and seems acceptable to most TGPs thus I can just use one template over and over again.
I haven’t heard this mentioned anywhere before so this next part will have some exclusive and potentially useful information gained through years of experience which could help save you lots of time, and time is money right? Check the Alexa rating of the TGPs. I’ll be doing a post here about Alexa soon for those of you unfamiliar with it, and yes I know some people say that Alexa isn’t important as it’s easily manipulatable, but those are usually people with poor Alexa ratings screaming that. I do have lots to say about Alaex but that’s a topic for another post. For now, just know to check before wasting too much time posting to some TGPs. Alexa has a FireFox Addon which will tell you the rating of each page in the top or bottom bar of your browser. TGPs with very bad (high numbers) Alexa ratings you can go ahead and just ignore as it’s probably not worth your effect to waste time posting to them. The rule I use is anything around the 1,000,000 mark or below is worth the effort. Niche sites which are below 3,000,000 might be worth the effort. Niche sites in particular are generally good places to post as their customers are looking for your exact type of content. All purpose TGPs are usually only worthwhile if they have an Alexa rating below 1,000,000. The Hun’s Alexa rating is about 7,000 meaning that there are only 7,000 other sites on the Internet with more traffic (traffic used loosely here as Alexa is more a survey or poll of a select group of people that are suppose to represent the population–much like the Nielsen for TV). This whole post today came about as I was looking over the ridiculously restrictive rules of another TGP who’s Alexa rating was 22,000,000! Wasn’t even worth finishing reading the rules as the time it’d take me to even click a button to post there wouldn’t be worth the effort.
I only post to a handful of TGPs. The Hun is at the top of my list. Persian Kitty fares well with an Alexa rating of 63,000. The other TGPs I post to are all niche specific and have worst Alexa ratings, but do fairly well. I’d welcome suggestions of other TGPs you might think are worthy of mention.
In another post I’ll explain some details about how to make a TGP for submission, and some ways to automate the process which will cut down your time making galleries and posting them.
Your comments are welcome and I’ll edit this post accordingly as many of you out there are much more knowledgeable about TGPs–I’m just speaking about what I’ve learned from experience over the years. I never put a lot of effort into TGPs though as simple word-of-mouth was enough to drive enough quality traffic to maintain a suitable lifestyle.