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08 Sep 2010

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	Thumbnail Gallery Fundamentals

Article Designing and promoting thumbnail galleries is one area of our business that countless webmasters involve themselves in at one point or another. There's so much traffic to be gained with seemingly little effort. That of course is just the initial perception, the reality proves otherwise. Any webmaster new to making galleries needs to understand that there are countless other webmasters competing for the same traffic...it takes more than just a dozen thumbs and a couple of affiliate links to pull in the sales you need.

Gallery Design

The design of your gallery, including the layout, are very important to consider when making galleries. You don't want your gallery to look like all the others surfers see everyday, and at the same time you don't want to go too crazy to where your surfers are confused or irritated. To see some great examples of well designed galleries all you have to do is surf through some TGPs yourself through the eyes of a surfer. While surfing through galleries ask yourself, which sites make you want to click through to the sponsored paysite? What about those galleries made you want to click? Which galleries didn't you like and why? The best way to figure out gallery design is to sit down and surf through them for a few hours, just DON'T copy the designs directly, you're only looking for inspiration to create your own designs.

Now for the popular dilema: Do you design your layouts to follow the strict rules of the bigger TGPs or do you allow your galleries more flexibility to sell and submit them only to the TGPs that accept them? The first option gives you the potential to get listed with the big guys who can send you tens of thousands of hits a day each. This at the same time will limit your potential to convert surfers on many other TGPs because it will be lacking the heavier marketing many of them allow. The second option can cut you off from getting listed with the big guys but you'll be marketing your sponsor well to all the many other TGPs you submit to.

Tough Solution: Decide on the design option you feel is best and run with it... don't look back.

Easy Solution: Make 2 versions of each gallery, one relatively clean & one ad heavy, submit accordingly.

Banners

Banner ads definitely have their place in marketing, just not in thumbnail galleries. TGP surfers are so experienced that they learned a long time ago not to click on banners. Banners in the TGP world scream 'Paysite', surfers know they're going to get hit with consoles if they click it....and therefore tend not to. To tempt more surfers into clicking you need to get creative with text and text links. Believe it or not surfers will read what you have to write if you do it in big, bold and in easy to read fonts and colors. Make your surfers horny and curious with your text and them hit them with a big bold text link. This will greatly improve your click through ratios.

Content

The content you choose to use in your galleries will play a huge roll in how many sales you make. If surfers have already seen the pics you're using many times they won't stick around long enough to buy, if the quality of your content is poor and grainy they won't buy, and also if you leave your pics uncompressed to preserve quality the file sizes may be so large they won't have time to let them download and of course won't buy.

1. Keep 'em Fresh: Don't buy content that's already been sold to hundreds of webmasters, try and hunt down fresh content from many providers. If your budget will allow always try and purchase niche content.

2. Keep 'em Few: Don't give away the farm, the last thing you want your surfers to do is get off on your gallery and leave. Try and keep your pic count to around 16, no less than 14 & no more than 18.

3. Keep 'em Clear: The last thing a surfer wants to pay for is small blury images, keep your thumbs and enlarged pics big and clear. Thumbs that are 150 pixels on the long end look great in a gallery, and for your enlarged pics try not to go smaller than 600. Also make sure they're all crystal clear, making them larger will make this easier.

Counters

Every now and again a debate will start about whether or not to use counters in galleries. Some feel counters are a traffic leak and unreliable, some feel the traffic that you lose to them wouldn't have bought from you anyway and find them convenient. Some use them because they pay a small commission per click, others use them for the potential traffic that can be returned to them. And of course some use counters because they're either on a free host or otherwise don't have access to their server logs. When all is said and done server logs will always be the most accurate, however popular counters that can pay you per click and even return some traffic are a great traffic stats solution for many.

Recycling

So what do you normally do once you post a gallery for the day? If you're following the old "Build-Submit-Forget-Repeat" adage you're losing out on some additional traffic you could be profiting from. Your new motto should be "Build-Submit-Submit Some More-Repeat". There are many ways you can work to drive more traffic to all your galleries after they've been listed and removed from TGPs:

1. Gateway Pages: Design a simple links page, add descriptive links to all your galleries and maybe even make some thumbs that link to them as well. Toss on a few Silvercash banners and submit it to all the search engines. If you eventually have a few of these pages made be sure to link them all together.

2. Free Sites: Make quick copies of a couple galleries and modify them to use in free sites. If you've been making daily galleries for just a few months you'll have enough to start a good network of free sites. Sumbit and enjoy the extra free traffic.

3. Gallery Pool: Make a gallery pool of all your own galleries for other webmasters to post on their TGPs. There's always new TGPs opening that need galleries, make a page that makes it easy for other webmasters to list yours first. The pool can either be just a page with links or a full blown rotating gallery pool script.

Wrapping it up

If there were one word important for new webmasters to remember when working with galleries it would be 'Consistency'. Above all, consistency is what really matters...you could have the most incredible well converting designs on the net but without consistently submitting them every day of the week you won't build up enough traffic to see any substantial profits from them. Webmasters just starting out with galleries should plan on submitting at least 1 gallery a day for 7 days a week, after a month try to increase it to 2 galleries a day for 7 days. Eventually your traffic will build to at least 250k/day or so and you can cut submissions to only 5 days per week. This level of consistency is more important than can be stressed.

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22 Oct 2008 10:58 PM