Monday, February 9, 2004 8:57 PM
TGP Automation
by Blazin
I entered this niche back in spring 2003 with the creation
of a black TGP/MGP of sorts called downassbitches. A few lucky
breaks and a bit of hard work (whoring out my programming
skills) allowed me to get this site pretty much established
in less than a month. At the time I was using purely free
scripts on this site, and they were doing an adequate, but
very basic job.
I also have a free movie series (common to most MGP's) which
I was updating manually everyday.
As I had been warned in the past, running a TGP can be a time
consuming task - and I was beginning to see why - getting
up every morning, checking the trades, reviewing the galleries,
and updating a movie series was
seriously starting to take up too much time - especially since
I had be at work for 9am. I had to add some automation to
this whole process to free up my time.
First thing I had to do was install a decent trade script
- as most of you know there are a lot of cheaters out there
and managing trades can be difficult to get right, it makes
sense to invest in a quality script that will take care of
everything so you don't have to baby-sit your trades. For
this I chose TM3 based on the recommendations of my peers.
Although some may scoff at the $400 for a trade script this
is probably the single most important investment you can make
for your TGP. Make sure you get a good one that will keep
your sites traffic at its optimum.
Second thing on the agenda was automating the movie series,
it hadn't yet occurred to me what to do with this until I
was approached by a large MGP owner who has a total of 5 movie
series on his site. He was seriously suffering whilst trying
to maintain all of the Sites, so he provided me with the software
specifications that he required to simplify his onerous tasks
and I got to work. The software now complete does all the
work for me - I simply upload the movie clips and thumbnails
- edit the templates and schedule it for the duration of the
series. It then auto-updates the movie series at my scheduled
times. An absolute lifesaver!! It was like having a huge weight
lifted off my shoulders...
Last but not least was the gallery script, anyone that runs
a TGP knows that you often get swamped with 100's of bogus
galleries. Some don't even bother to read the rules you just
end up in some autosubmitters database and end up getting
100's of galleries a day that are not even in your niche,
never mind the cheaters.
At this stage I was getting loads of them and the free script
I was using meant I had to go through and manually delete
about 150 galleries a day since it had no blacklist function.
I purchased AutoGallery SQL and once I had figured out the
templates, I installed it. Fortunately, I didn't need to use
the blacklist function right away as I had changed the location
of the script. I added an email address and asked for partner
applications on the script page. All partners get auto-approved
and I do check up on them from time to time to make sure they
are abiding by the rules, and still take regular submissions
from webmasters since diversity helps the site.
Now every morning I wake up and go to work - safe in the
knowledge that my scripts have updated my sites for me and
the trade script is taking care of traffic, if need be I take
a few hours a week to look after it and make any minor tweaks
and approve a few galleries.
Now what I have ended up with on my hands is virtually an
automated revenue stream, which seems to be the name of the
game if you want to make some good money out of this business
and of course, can build lots of them. Although this isn't
a pure 'build and forget' site, it as close as you can get
a TGP without switching to 100% hosted galleries.
The key for me is, most importantly to have sites that work
for me and NOT the other way around.
Blazin
http://www.downassbitches.com
comments? flames? or questions post
here
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