Lesson #21 TGP vs. Pic Post Marketing
Written By Cyndalie

In a world where search engines dominate the traffic game and true ability and good knowledge is scarce, adult webmasters have created some of their own high traffic generating programs, as well as their own worst enemies in the same breath.

Ideas born of "offer something free and they will come" have played the role of a double edged sword when it comes to the over-saturation of free porn and and dwindling conversion ratios. In this article we will discuss the evolution of today's TGP and Picture Posts, and how to use them to your advantage.

The Evolution of the TGP

The Thumbnail Gallery Post (TGP) was the brain child of a few adult webmasters who felt their outdated content galleries could be used to generate more incoming traffic. They figured that by giving something to adult visitors for free would therefore generate more interest (traffic) and therefore more sales and up-sells. After 1998 the magic began to fizz. Due to the increasing competition for adult site traffic and the huge increase of adult sites and adult webmasters online, the free content that was being offered at TGP's began to get more hardcore (an unregulated) and webmasters began purchasing galleries specifically for use on TGP pages.

The problem with this evolution was now adult webmasters were advertising content not even found at their web sites. Descriptions started to become useless and banners and links began going blind. Pop-up's dominated and customers began to get frustrated. The misdirection of visitors began to lead to a general mistrust in the entire adult online industry and was only tarnished further with the introduction of dialers auto-downloading and god-knows-what being embedded into your browser. Even worse was the increase in free hardcore content that was becoming available to minors with no way of guarding their entry. Not to mention the 2257 compliance nightmare looming over the horizon.

Although some webmasters feel that TGP's are nothing more than time consuming, bandwidth hogging, content wasting machines, the TGP is still a very valid traffic generator because webmasters and administrators of TGP's, and now affiliate programs (keeping content "in house" through hosted galleries), have become the police. Stricter rules for submission listing became enforced, blacklists of cheating webmasters were created, and now submissions are limited to rules defining the number of images, the number of banners, the number of reciprocal links per gallery, the number of pop-up's allowed per page, and much more. If the administrators of TGP's did not step up to enforce higher standards for submission, I feel TGP's would be mostly a waste of time and bandwidth for adult webmasters. Fortunately, many TGP's remain a valid and measurable traffic and sales generator for most webmasters today. Especially for the independant paysite owner or content producer.

Still, there is a game to be played. Often getting your gallery submission in the TGP is just as tricky as submitting to search engines. My advice is read the rules, FOLLOW the rules, create alliances with TGP owners/operators, and develop your own list of TGP's that accept your submissions and drive your site traffic as well. How do you measure your success? To measure traffic you can use individual web based trackers such as FoxCounter.com, which even pays you for the number of hits they count! If your site uses an affiliate program perhaps you can assign each TGP a referral code to track sales from each TGP you regularly submit to. Google's new Analytics tool can now be used for stats counting and conversion tracking. Need tips on building a TGP? Check out this article. I also suggest reading Tips for Submitting to TGP's by Richard of widely popular Richard-Realm.com. Also, make sure that you check out the Macro TGP Lessons on Cozy Academy. Be sure to include all relevant 2257 compliance statements, links, and other disclaimers on any pages you create with explicit material in them.

The Pic Post Advantage

Although not as popular, there are many advantages to picture posts. It takes less time to create and maintain pic post pages and they consume less content and bandwidth. There are fewer rules and guidelines to follow and automated submissions are often accepted or encouraged. Also, in my experience, pic post pages tend to remain active longer and drive more click thru's as there is less content to be viewed for free therefore encourage visitors to see more in the tour of your site. Picture posts are typically one good sized image, your site's banner or logo, and reciprocal links to the picture posts submitted to.

The icing on the cake is that when you create each pic post page you can optimize it for the search engines for selected keyword/phrase easily and effectively allowing the page to work for you for the long term when you submit to the pic posts as well as submit to the search engines the same day. This can be done for TGP's as well, however it is risky to allow so many free images per page to be downloaded because as time passes you may forget about these heavy pages in the search engines. Your bandwidth costs can increase immensely once these pages are available to be found via regular search engine queries.

When submitting to pic posts and TGP's (or related Movie galleries and posts), either build your own lists or use lists posted at resource centers like CozyFrog.com and others, will help you devise a strategy for everyday marketing use that's not too time consuming and uses your content to your advantage.

Some healthy guidelines for using both TGP's and Picture Posts are to use only softer-core or censored hardcore content. Sure you may want to offer a free sample, but why buy the milk when you can have the cow for free? Give them reasons to join and try to differentiate your site as much as you can. Spend an extra few minutes writing good content and descriptions, tell the surfers why your site is different, why they should join, and what else they can find inside. Use text, text links, and image alt tags to entice your visitors – by offering even more "free pictures inside" included in your tour can also help you to get more click-thru's (especially with picture posts) to your site and a great opportunity to market your pay site as containing "free" content "updated daily" to keep them coming back.

Finally, keep running lists of the sites that accept your submission, try to develop and maintain relationships with the webmasters of posts that work for you. Stay organized; keep a catalog (I recommend using Excel) of the pages you create, date, and list submitted to. Once a TGP page or PicPost page expires, often you will know via email notifications or set period from date submitted or posted, try simply replacing the image content and re-using the page later to save you time. If you delete the page, make sure your 404 Page Not Found errors redirect to your home page. If you are optimizing your TGP pages for search engines as well, be sure to disable the click-to-large-sized images after the page has expired. Use every page and every marketing task to your full, long term advantage. After a few weeks you can develop a solid marketing routine covering TGP and Picture Posts and seamlessly integrate them with your other marketing efforts including search engine marketing.