Bandwidth, image size & pitching sponsor

[Chop Smith]

Greenguy and Jim,

Everyone has peeped on you leg enough. Let's go to work and help a year old newbie.

The details to questions can be found at http://www.choponthelake.com/chopstest.htm

1. Is this the norm for bandwidth usage?
2. For image sizing, where is the balance between quality and compression?
3. Take a look at the galleries and give me pointers on improving the sales pitch.

Seasoned webmasters help me. I am thick skinned, let me have your critizism.

Take a look at the popup window on page 2 for a special offer to GreenguyandJim subscribers. Just in case you miss the link, it is http://www.choponthelake.com/tgplist2.htm No bull this offer is being made only to GreenguyandJim's members. So if you are interested in obtaining the list or database include your GreenguyandJim username in your email.

Chop
I just tried click on your link and got 404.
Remind me in the morning and I will take a look.

[Keyser Soze]

Originally posted by Jim
Chop
I just tried click on your link and got 404.
Remind me in the morning and I will take a look.

Theres a dot at the end of the link worked for me after I changed it

[Keyser Soze]

Chop

I looked a bit and compared them to my own stats.

Around 20-25GB per 100K is around average for me submitting 15-18 pic galleries with 3-4kb thumbs, pics 26-40kb in size and then the graphics of the gallery design on top of that.

A couple of things stood out as I looked on your stats.

1. A thumb size of 8kb is a bit big for me I usually do thumbs with a size of 160 on the longest side average for me today was 3.5kb which is average for me. I use photoshop to make the thumbs best program I have found doing that job.

2. The size of your pics I never go over 40kb per pic and try to get them in the neighborhood of 30kb with a max size of 700 pixels on the longest side.

3. The number of clicks to your sponser is way to low only 880 clicks to the sponsor isn´t enough you should atleast do 5 times that (could be the way the FlashCash counts never tried them so I wouldn´t know)

Those 3 things was the ones that stood out compared to my stats.

I took a quick glance at the galleries you should get some more text in there, tease the surfer make him click.

I´m no way a expert on galleries just my 2 cents and I´m sure some of the fine folks here can give you some more hints to how to get more traffic to your sponsor.

[Chop Smith]

Jim,

Keyser was correct. The 404 was caused by the period at the end of the links. I corrected the thread so it will work now.


Keyser,

Bandwidth - Then, based on your stats the bandwidth would be between 93G and 115G. Therefore it appears that the 111G would be okay.

Thumb size - I have settled on 125 on the longest size. Just need to increase the compression a tad. I use the resize tool included with TGP Assistant. Sometimes I tweak them with Photoshop.

Image size - I am going with 600 on the longest size. Maybe I need to go to a medium setting and sacrifice image quality for better compression.

Number of clicks - If I could have gotten 5 times more based on the numbers I would have had 10 signups. Even at FlashCash's $20 free trial, the net after bandwidth charges would be $111. I probably had 11 hours of time invested in the galleries. I guess $10 per hours is better than greeting at Wal-Mart.

Conclusion - I think it comes back to my lack of ability to get the surfer to the sponsor.

Say you input was worth way more than 2 cents. Thanks for your time. If I can ever help you give me a shout.

[Bill]

Chop, it's always interesting to see a snapshot of real numbers from real galleries, thanks for posting that.

Your pictures are way too big, on the average. Photoshops web photo gallery tool does a pretty good job of resizing images. Your target size should be 20-30k per image, maybe 25-40k if your bandwidth is cheap. I try to size pics at about 500x700, with a compression of 1, which, depending on the background of the pic, will usually get you the size you need. The drop in quality from the compression is negligible, and your pics will be competitive with the other good gallery builders. This varies somewhat from series to series, some series just don't compress well.

Last year pics in the 15-25k size range were acceptable, this year, with the bandwidth price drop and the harsher competition, larger pics are the standard.

Resize your pics, and your bandwidth bill gets cut approximately in half.

Your selling is the biggest problem, you have to sell with intensity and focus with galleries, or you will lose money every time.

[Chop Smith]

Bill,

Appeciate it. Looks like the bandwidth/image problem is going to be easy to solve. The selling thing is going to be more difficult. Being a numbers man, marketing does not come easy to me. Maybe Jim, Greenguy and you other webmasters will give me a crash course in 101 Selling Porn.

You know as far as losing money; education and experience does not come without a price. I have a year invested and several thousand dollars in web projects. I am willing to pay my dues.

Thanks again.

Chop
To me...a site with only text links never work. They are too close to being blind. Try placing a few banners in the middle and near the bottom.

Also, I wanted to see what you had at http://www.choponthelake.com

Put a warning page in there and call it index.html. I am not the only person that is going to check that page out and by having just a directory, you have, as my Great Grandma NeNe used to say, "Your cock and balls hanging out".

I do appreciate the popup

:love:

[Keyser Soze]

Originally posted by Chop Smith
Bill,

Appeciate it. Looks like the bandwidth/image problem is going to be easy to solve. The selling thing is going to be more difficult. Being a numbers man, marketing does not come easy to me. Maybe Jim, Greenguy and you other webmasters will give me a crash course in 101 Selling Porn.

You know as far as losing money; education and experience does not come without a price. I have a year invested and several thousand dollars in web projects. I am willing to pay my dues.

Thanks again.

I suck at designing galleries and making text to tease the surfer so I got some tgp templates made with 10 of those for the different sites you promote you can rotate them so they stay fresh. I saw a link on this board to a place that made 10 galleries for less than $100 maybe that could be a way to go

[xpander]

Hi Chop Smith,

After reviewing your galleries, I think there are a few very simple things you can do to increase your sponsor clicks:

1) Underline your text links. Most of your galleries did not have an underline. Believe it or not, many newbie web surfers identify with the underline, they understand it's a link that will take them somewhere. If they are skimming over the page and just see pics and text, they may not immediately recognize your links even though they say '...Click Here..'.

2) Change your picture layout. Try to oriente your ads first, then place your pics around the ads. Make the ads stand out... most of your galleries just had wide rows of pics. Take a look at top gallery spots on TGPs and you'll see that their lay out is usually mixed up a little bit. Gotta make that surfer move his/her eyes around every one of your ads.

3) Use some graphics. Most of your galleries had only 2-4 lines of text including the links to your sponsor. I suggest you try to use some odd sized banners and add even more text to your gallery. You could even use a few teaser pics (like a collage of girls on your sponsor's site) that are not linked to the sponsor or to a full size pic, and place them next to your text. You can also make some animated images (.GIFs) that blink your text links. The blink effect can be accomplished with some Javascript too.

4) Pick your colors carefully. When I was looking at your galleries, two or three of them were really hard on my eyes. The colors you chose did contrast each other, but they seemed to be a few shades off from achieving that nice soft effect on the eyes. If your gallery is an eye sore to the surfer, they'll be outta there real quick. Try picking a light background color, then for your text pick the same color only five shades darker. Then pick 1-2 more colors that really stand out but still match the overall page (e.g. - bright red, blue, yellow, green, black, or white), and use those for your underlined text links. Another good way to choose colors is to match something in the pictures you're using (e.g. - the girl's shirt color, or the color of the couch in the background).

I think if you improve on those things you could easily increase your click-thru numbers. Oh, and when you write your text, think about what would make you click thru to the sponsor... pretend you are the surfer. You have to get them turned on... when I looked at your galleries, I immediately thought that they were too predictable for the surfer. TGP surfers know exactly what to look for to find the free pics/movies/whatever. You have to make your sales text stand out first of all, and then the text itself has to be convincing!

Anyhow... good luck! Come back here with more galleries if you want... I'm going to try and hang out on this board if I have time. Don't mind doing some more reviews.

[x]

[Chop Smith]

Jim,

Thanks for looking. It was stupid of me not to move those download files to another domain. Good thing that military stuff was non senstive material. I am nowing sending the surfers back to you. Go here ( http://www.choponthelake.com ) to see what I am doing with the site.

I am searching for some scripts to do some things. I am drawing a blank and need to hire someone to do som php work. I move around in it fairly well but it would take me forever to accomplish what I want to achieve. Can you recommend someone??

Xpander,

Damn! You spent some time sharing your thoughts. I appreaciate it and will try to put them to good use. Hope you do not mind me calling on you again.

[Fuseblown]

I agree with Keyser...just from WorldSex alone, on a very stripped down gallery, I used around 35gigs for about 120-140k *uniques*...there were many raws as well that went back to the gallery and looked at pictures again as well. Just to add a second opinion to that.

Not sure if you hand code your HTML or use a WYSIWYG editor like FP or Dreamweaver, but if you're looking to make complete efficient use of your bandwidth, hand coding is the way to go.

I ran some tests at one point where I could save 100-300MB just from using efficient coding structure just on one gallery that got posted to some of the large TGP's. It doesn't seem like much, but multiple that a couple hundred times, and, depending on how much you pay for bandwidth, it'll save you a little money. That's just a side thought..

:cool:

[Chop Smith]

Fuseblown,

I use FrontPage, but usually use EditPad to edit it. Did not know that it could make that much difference. Thanks for taking a look.

[Chop Smith]

Keyser,

I've been thinking about the professional templates. Would you post some links to some of your galleries in order that I can see what you are doing with them.

Chop

[Fuseblown]

Originally posted by Chop Smith
Fuseblown,

I use FrontPage, but usually use EditPad to edit it. Did not know that it could make that much difference. Thanks for taking a look.

FP and Dreamweaver tend to use a lot of repetitive tags and such that have no effect on how the page is displayed, so it's just extra "weight" sitting in your file. Hand coding can definately help, but it will only help if you're efficient about the way you use your code and tags.

Every extra character in the HTML is an extra byte, again it might not seem like much, but if your gallery is getting pounded with tons of traffic, it can make a difference across all of your galleries, etc.

100 extra bytes viewed 100,000 times is 10,000,000 bytes or approx 10MB, an extra 1KB is approx. 100MB when viewed 100,000 times, etc. I can usually save myself 2-3KB on the HTML alone just by hand coding it, which can add up in the long-run.

:beer:

[Keyser Soze]

Originally posted by Chop Smith
Keyser,

I've been thinking about the professional templates. Would you post some links to some of your galleries in order that I can see what you are doing with them.

Chop

Sure this is one of them http://www.mypetitepies.com/tgp/papa...ardcore31.html it seems to get listed most places and I´m doing good with it.
Its made by http://www.adultgalleryservice.com

I´ve seen a increase in sales on my traffic since I started using them so I´m not going back to the old style galleries I used to do

[Chop Smith]

Keyser,

I assume that Papa Hymen is your AVS site. I guess you could make the link to a full page ad for a sponsor.

Chop

[Keyser Soze]

Papahymens is a paysite ARS have under their BYOT (build your own tour) program I got the gallery made specially to promote this site since I have done very well with it

[xpander]

Originally posted by Fuseblown
I ran some tests at one point where I could save 100-300MB just from using efficient coding structure just on one gallery that got posted to some of the large TGP's. It doesn't seem like much, but multiple that a couple hundred times, and, depending on how much you pay for bandwidth, it'll save you a little money. That's just a side thought..
:cool:

If you wanna shrink all your HTML and CSS files by about 10% (average), check this program out:

http://www.leafdigital.com/Software/HTMLShrink/

It'll remove all the unnecessary new lines and other characters from your code but still keep to standard specifications.

[x]

[xpander]

Originally posted by Chop Smith

I am searching for some scripts to do some things. I am drawing a blank and need to hire someone to do som php work. I move around in it fairly well but it would take me forever to accomplish what I want to achieve. Can you recommend someone??

Xpander,

Damn! You spent some time sharing your thoughts. I appreaciate it and will try to put them to good use. Hope you do not mind me calling on you again.

No problem... hit me up here, if I dont' respond within a few days then I might have missed your post. Just PM me. Lots of boards to keep track of these days.

Also, if you're looking for a programmer to do some custom PHP work, try contacting TDavid of
tdscripts.com, he's got a good reputation and he coded a ton of the stuff on Adult NetSurprise's site.

[x]

Have you checked out
http://php.resourceindex.com/

You would be surprised what people have already thought of. I have always been of the thought of why reinvent the wheel?

[Chop Smith]

Jim,

Thanks for the link. I missed that one but I having been searching for about six months for some scripts that I could modify to fit some special needs. Being a programmer, it is going to be hard to turn the project to someone else but I just not that good with php. Had a quote from a guy to it. His quote was too low and figured that he would not produce and he didn't. Thank goodness that I did not pay him upfront.

When things get settled down for you and Greenguy, I am going to sent you a private message to my links for the stuff I am doing for choponthelake.com. I hope to finish before July 1.

When you get a chance check my thread in the Sponsor Tryout section. I would like to submit this page this weekend.

Chop

[backoffbitch]

WOW!, thats some impressive traffic numbers. Makes me want to give your system a good try. with those kind of traffic numbers I should be able to get lots of traffic to sponsor with my average 10 percent ctr I am able to pull out of my ass with galleries.


One tip I can give for keeping gallery sizes down, use square cropped thumbs. A 120 x 120 thumbs looks just as big as a 120 x 160 and will probably drop a third (or more depending on how busy the image map is) off the total file size even compressed at 50 percent in PS7.
An exaple of this is http://back-off-bitch.net/gal/ftv/mandy/index2.htm

To the average surfer or even the quick reviewer the thumbs look really large, but they aren't. A jedi mind trick someone tought me.


EDIT: ... last minute thought... Insteda of using 3 of those 250 x 250 big thumbs, use a banner, probably less bytes used, and a better CTR percentage because surfers love banners.

[Fuseblown]

The square thumbs is a good tip! Thanks!

[backoffbitch]

Originally posted by Fuseblown
The square thumbs is a good tip! Thanks!

Your welcome