Costs & Bandwidth Management
by Rollerboy

Many webmasters have heard the warning that “if you’re gonna tgp, you’ll burn lots of BW” or something of that nature. Let me clarify this. TGPing is not about burning BW, it’s about making money!!! So, how come you rarely hear people say “if you’re gonna tgp, you’ll be making lots of money”? That’s because most newer webmasters start to TGP before they are ready, so all they do is to burn massive BW, while not making a decent profit from it. It’s quite obvious that your net profit is your gross sales minus your cost of BW (plus other misc. expenses). Therefore, managing your BW bill plays an important role in maximizing your bottom line.

The first step for a newer webmaster to take is to establish a BW Budget -- or in other words, the amount of extra BW that you can afford to and am willing to burn. Let's take a quick look at some of the questions that you can ask yourself:

1. How much am I paying a month for my hosting plan, and how many gigs does it allow?

2. How much does it charge for overage, and by what increments?

3. How much BW am I using per month? Do I have excess BW left unused or am I paying for overage already?

Then, the ultimate question is: “How much more cash can I afford to and am willing to spend per month to TGP?”

Once you have all these numbers in place, you can determine your BW budget.

Let’s use a hypothetical here: John Doe has a 50 gig a month plan which he pays $180, and $4 per gig for overage. His free sites are averaging 30 gigs a month, so he actually has 20 gigs of paid for but unused BW per month. John takes a look at his savings account and is comfortable to spend another $100 a month to TGP.

With $100, he can purchase an extra 25 gigs in overage ($100 divided by $4 per gig).

He already has 20 gigs of excess BW (50 gigs minus 30 gigs)

Therefore, his BW budget is 45 gigs a month, or about 1.5 gig a day.

Working within a BW budget is the first step to avoid surprises or financial stress while a newer webmaster learns to TGP. However, I must caution you that there will be surprises no matter how well you plan. Often times you can have a very nice gallery and get picked up by a major without you even submitting to them. I had a tits gallery once that got picked up by a major tits TGP that sent me almost 30K traffic on the first day. Another time, one of my interracial galleries got picked up by a few TGP's & sent me over 40K on the first day.

Now let’s take a look at how one can try to work within the average daily traffic. The two key words here are “try” & “average”. First of all, one can only “try” since there are so many variables which are beyond the control of the webmaster. For example, not all the TGP’s that you submit to will list your gallery, and not everyone will list you on the same day. Secondly, you may submit to an “unfamiliar” TGP and get a lot more traffic than you had anticipated. Moreover, your gallery can also get picked up by TGP’s which you didn’t submit to. Conversely, just when you are expecting massive traffic, most of the TGP’s that you submitted to may decide not to list your gallery.

Traffic management is a good thing, and is definitely one thing that I would encourage newer webmasters to do. However, bear in mind that we can only “try”, and your true indication of your traffic is your average daily traffic, since the peaks or valleys of a day’s traffic is quite meaningless.

When you first submit your galleries, try to work within your traffic budget, and avoid the majors which will probably send you more traffic than you are ready to handle. You would first build a clean page (with no recip to anyone), and you can submit this to the smaller TGP’s that accept clean galleries. Then you will mirror this page and build galleries with recips. Three to four recips per gallery is generally recommended. When you match your recips, make sure you match the ones who have the same rules; eg, if you know there are 4 TGP’s that accept pics on html pages, then you might want to group them together and build one gallery with html pages for them.

After you finish submitting your first batch of galleries, your next major mission is to track your traffic, and be familiar with the approximate amount of traffic each TGP sends you. Check your stats daily to study not just the traffic, but also the BW usuage, making sure that you do not burn more than 1 gig per 10K uniques. If you do, you’ll need to optimize your page better. As you get better, you will be able to handle about 15K visitors per gig, and many of the experienced webmasters can handle up to 20K per gig. Nevertheless, 1 gig per 10K visitor is what a newer webmaster should aim for in the beginning.

After a few weeks, you should be very familiar with the approximate amount of traffic each TGP will send you. Then, you would know whom you should submit to in order to achieve your avarage daily traffic, and how you can try to manage your traffic within your BW budget. But whatever you do, don’t forget to fasten your seatbelts as you take that roller coaster ride with your BW meter, and always believe in Murphy’s Law!

Happy $elling!

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