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TGPs

By

Aleck

Lately TGPing is getting more and more important, as almost all traffic has gone to TGPs. So, I'll try to explain how to get most of the TGP part of the industry, step-by-step.

First of all - choose niche, then choose sponsors, not overused, with unique content, 3rd party billing, be sure to be able to contact owners if needed, with recurring without trial - that's the most valueable form or partnership. You will need hosting - linux or freebsd, don't go with Microsoft's IIS (hotlink protection is important and IIS isn't the best in it), go with Apache to have things simple (Apache's speed is very good, no need in fancy ultra fast servers software), 300-800 gigs per month on burstable line (even 5Mbps is not good enough, peaks can saturate it), business class stats - analog or webalizer won't give you any real info actually - go for Urchin, preferably get a dedicated server, grab some domains, 2-3 will be okay. Choose traffic sources: traffic brokers, paid spots, partner accounts with big or niched tgps, small niched tgps. Be careful with big multi-category TGPs, so of them has questionable quality of niched traffic. Shop for some content or contact your sponsors about giving you some content from their members area.

Start driving traffic: always use gallery templates (about 1-2 per week for each sponsor/site), build your own only. Build galleries using these templates in batches (around 100-200 at once). Be sure to have list of galleries for each traffic source. Check your average CTR% value, it should be 4-8%, if lower - tweak your templates.

After two weeks check traffic sources, check sponsor's referring urls - make a decision which traffic is valuable to you and which is not, increase the quantity of valueable traffic (there are tons of ways) and weed out the traffic that is only burning your bandwidth and time.

Two more weeks - time to make your first summary - total expenses on a) traffic b) content c) hosting d) design if you were paying for it (not recommended actually. designers are designers, but not sellers); total profits: from each sponsor; total traffic (uniques per month). Some calculations will help you in this: {total profit, $}/{total traffic, uniques}*1000=value per 1k of unique visitors {total expenses, $}/{total traffic, uniques}*1000=your expenses to get that 1k First value should be at least 2-3 higher than second one.

Next month - check traffic sources as before still getting more valueable traffic. Also start checking your rebills, if they are low - drop that sponsor, unless the value per 1k unique visitors is higher than average even with such low rebills.

Start next niche the same way: new sponsor, new traffic sources, new server.

Some values you should be looking for: traffic per niche - 1-2M uniques per month, profits per 1k unique visitors $0.5-2, costs of paid traffic $0.2-0.4 per 1k (sometimes it can get higher, be careful with that, never trust TGP owner's claims about the quality of the traffic. buy less and test first).

Also don't forget - ratios doesn't matter at all; value per click doesn't matter at all. Only expenses and profits per month do matter.

Good luck!