Maybe my Christmas gallery will be approved in time for St. Patrick’s day.

I’m unsure without paid partner accounts from the bigger TGPs that this tool is ‘worth it’. It might pay for itself with a little extra using free TGP submissions but no windfalls. It’s not the tool though, it’s the TGPs. Almost 90% of my TGP traffic and sales come from my paid partner accounts. The TGPs with big traffic that are free to submit to I could count on one hand. I use the Chameleon Submitter because it speeds up creating mirror pages, thumbnails and submission times, and the additional 200+ TGPs it allows me to submit to for free is just extra. In short, if you’re not going to buy premium partner accounts I would look elsewhere.

Example: Submit Pass ‘X’ at $40/mo which gives 170k traffic per month to galleries

So you can see the difference between the ‘poor results’ (the minimum we should expect from submitting TGP galleries) and the ‘good results’ (excellent designed galleries with good content and sales text leading to solid sponsor sites). Selling adult memberships is a very volatile business, so please understand these numbers are averaged out and can sway dramatically for each webmaster.

Periodically I check my TGP gallery CTRs, especially if I’m using a new template. For me personally so far my worst CTR on a TGP gallery I’ve checked was 1.13% and the best was 6.97%. You can safely assume I dropped the low CTR template in a hurry!

Results for submitting 5 TGP galleries a day for 30 days of June across many niches:

Start date: 01/Jun/2009 at 04:03:19
End date: 30/Jun/2009 at 04:02:19
Pageviews: 6,159,233 (hits minus graphics)

Of my top 20 referrers, 11 are paid partner accounts, 4 scrape galleries from my paid partner accounts, and 4 are free partner accounts (though one free partner account covered 3 different TGP sites). The #1 referrer sent over 23 times the traffic the #20 referrer did. The 20th spot, The Hun, is free and does not require a partner account. I don’t think they list many of my galleries because I try to actually sell a site instead of loading the gallery with 30+ pics and/or 8+ long movies and little sales text. Slightly bitter, I know.

Stripping out the bogus google referrer from TgpX submissions and sitewide searches, Google sent 6318 hits to my TGP galleries over the 30 days, of which 290 was from google image traffic. Yahoo sent 1559 hits. The newest contender, Bing, sent 531 hits. Search engines accounted for just 0.14% of the total traffic to the TGP galleries.

It’s also worth noting that my likely largest source of traffic is not listed because it’s the only TGP site that whitepages TGP galleries. This is Pichunter and the other sites on the Krawl network. This basically means they have a local web page url on Pichunter that hotlinks the images and some sales text from my gallery to improve their search engine optimization.

The problem with TGP galleries is their lifespan is very short. Most of their traffic comes from being listed on the main TGP page, with most sites listing the previous 1-5 days of submissions. Being at the top of the category or archive pages does bring in some traffic, but as it gets pushed down it quickly becomes miniscule. Although submitting TGP galleries brings in a ton of traffic, the quality is low (about 1-5% CTR) and requires daily submissions to maintain a good income. It’s a grind, but luckily it doesn’t require much skill.

Results for submitting 2 LL freesites a day for 30 days of June across many niches:

Start date: 01/Jun/2009 at 04:03:31
End date: 30/Jun/2009 at 04:02:13
Pageviews: 430,468 (hits minus graphics)

Of my top 20 referrers, 1 is a paid partner account, 7 are trusted or partner accounts, and the rest are free for anyone to submit to. The #1 referrer sent almost 20 times the traffic the #20 referrer did.

Stripping out the bogus google referrer from TgpX submissions and sitewide searches, Google sent 5106 hits to my LL freesites over the 30 days, of which 9 was from google image traffic. Yahoo sent 346 hits. The newest contender, Bing, sent 47. Search engines accounted for just 1.28% of the total traffic to the freesites. I thought that would be higher.

The problem with LL freesites is their lifespan is also limited, but not nearly so much as TGP galleries. However a large portion of their traffic is from search engines so the quality is good (15-25% CTR). With few exceptions, they also hard link to freesites as opposed to using script links with skim like many TGP sites, keeping quality high. Daily submissions are required to maintain a fair income. It’s also a grind and more involved than building TGP galleries. However with few exceptions linklists don’t charge for partner accounts, unlike many TGP sites.

Comparison of TGP gallery traffic and LL freesite traffic:

It took me the same amount of time to build and submit 5 TGP galleries as it did to build and submit 2 LL freesites per day. This included basically all the sites I could find to submit to. Now that I have my stats, I’ll be removing the sites that aren’t worth manually submitting to (on a time vs traffic return basis) so my total submission time should decrease.

TGP gallery Pageviews: 6,159,233 x 3% avg CTR = roughly 184,776 hits to sponsors.
LL freesite Pageviews: 430,468 x 20% avg CTR = roughly 86,094 hits to sponsors.

So submitting TGP galleries gives me about 14 times more traffic than submitting LL freesites and over twice the resulting sponsor hits, however I paid about $665 in TGP partner accounts for June ($450 worth keeping), as opposed to $8 for one paid LL partner account. These are just 2 of the many sources of traffic I have, but they account for about 75% of my total hits to sponsors.

What are your results?