Ok guys, as I have received several request to ask how I could track efficiently my screensavers installs, I am going to share my script.

I immediately wrote that script because when it comes to the web, it is essential to track your projects, for 2 reasons:

1) It is always encouraging to see that people are actually using the stuff you make, so it is a good motivation to go on.

2) When you do something, you must measure if that works or not. If it works, do it more, if it doesn’t do something else.

Most of the time you will read blogs of “internet gurus”, they talk about their projects which are so successful, with thousands of subscribers, thousands of $$$, and you think “I wish I was bright like them and know what I need to do to be successful on the web”.

The truth is : They didn’t know more than you do when they started, and even now when they start a project, they usually don’t know how successful it is going to be. The trick is : they just try! And then they track how their project is going, and if it is good, they can brag about it! But be certain that for one success, we all have 10 failures. The good thing is that on the internet, you can fail and it is not the end of the world. Just try something else. (This rule applies to real life too, by the way)

Anyway, enough said, you can download the script here to Track your screensavers installs.

Please note that it can be used for any software that you would write !

It is not rocket-science, the principle is the following:

Once you have your software/screensaver ready, you must create an installer. There are many softwares to do that : InnoSetup, Nsis, etc.

You can make your installer execute a windows command at the end of the setup (if your installer maker doesn;t support it, throw it away and use another one).

The command you want to execute is

This command will open an internet page to an advertising/Thank you/readme page.

This ad page simply tracks what software you just installed.

I included another page that will calculate several stats about your installations.

You need PHP/MySql to put the pages on your server.

Just read the instructions in the zip file and have fun with it!

Side note: This script is very useful when you bundle a pay-per-install program such as Zango or Rasermedia, because you can compare the stats they will give you and how many screensavers you know have really been installed.

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Hey guys, so here are the explanations about one method I tried for make some money out of screensavers.

I realised that setting the homepage to your own google search engine was currently one of the most effective way to bring a bit of cash. But then I saw that eventually, almost every user would remove this default homepage. My overall number of installed homepages is increasing, but very slowly. The daily number of new people having their homepage set is just a bit above the number of people removing it. So I thought, if 95% of the people were going to remove my homepage from their browser, I’d rather try a quick and agressive cash method on them.

So the plan was to display some popups to the user, with some affiliates links on them.
You already know how to earn money as an affiliate, so I suggest you go and subscribe to universally appealing affiliates programs (Lose weight, remove spywares, make money at home, get cheap electronics, etc.). Then you will make your own popup generator that will display say 1 popup every 20 minutes. You don’t want to get too intrusive there.

How will you launch your popup generator? From your search homepage! Everytime the user will open his browser, your homepage will execute this popup generator. Then the popup generator will display ads until the user closes his browser.
So how are you going to create a popup generator? You’re lucky, I will give you the code of mine. I did it in php and javascript, it is crappy as hell, but damn easy to understand and use. What I want to show you here is that even if you are not a coder, with a bit of html and some brain, you can make some neat stuffs. Please get inspired from my crappy code and make your own sauce.

Download popup generator - javascript.zip

Look at the files and the explanation, the whole trick is to make your homepage execute the popup generator when the user navigates away (done easily in javascript). The popup generator will use a Javascript “timeout” to open a browser window every 20 min. (you can configure it in the code). The browser window will display an ad page. I could have done it in php, but I did it in javascript in case you want to be able to test it on a non-php server.
Because I actually advise that you install this popup generator on another server (maybe a free homepage), so your google search homepage will execute it, but when someone catches it, he will not know easily it was started by your main homepage.

Don’t be afraid if you implement this idea, you will see (if you look at your stats) that when you begin to do this, you will get a lot of people who will remove your homepage from their default setting, so you will have a big loss in your adsense earning. what happened to me is that after a few weeks, I reached a point where this loss stopped, and my number of homepage installed started to increase again. Then the affiliate earnings started to increase as well and the potential loss of adsense/google search money was very acceptable compared to the new extra affiliate income.

Even in the unlikely case where google would ban your homepage that would just mean your homepage would not be in their search results… So what? all the traffic is coming from the users having the homepage as default in their browsers!!!

I started to think about going further with this techniques, and I thought of a crazy yet interesting idea. I didn’t implement the “darker” solution I am going to explain, so be aware that if you ever do it, it is at your own risks!

Keep the same principle, a popup generator, but instead of doing it in html from your homepage, write it in an advanced language (C++, java, perl, whatever). So here you need more advanced programming skills, yet it is not as tough as you would imagine, and if you know a bit of coding, you might make some nice extra bucks just spending a day writing such a program..

So first, go and subscribe as an affiliate to sell their products. Get all the affiliate URLs and put them in a text file.
You are going now to write a little program that will display one of the ads from your list every hour. We will call this program an ads-rotator.
You will register this program so it starts everytime Windows starts.
[would you like me to put such a program on the website for you to download?]
What would be easy at this point is to have your screensaver setup installing this little program, but if you do that, people will quickly find that installing your screensavers brought them problems, and you might get flagged as adware or worse, virus.
That’s why you will have to be sneaky on this, and you will rely on the natural instincts of people -> which are bad by nature!

I don’t know which screensaver maker software you are using, but you need to use one which allows you to create a shareware screensaver. The screensaver is limited and the user needs to pay for a licence code to unlock it and have the full version.

You will rely then on temptation. What you have to do is to create a program which is a fake keygen. A keygen is a small program that generate a registration number for a specific software. Keygens are made available by software cracking groups for free download on various websites dedicated to software piracy. Usually it is a simple program that ask you a name, and generate the key from it. Then you can enter the name and key in the software to unlock it and get the full version.
I said make a fake keygen, because you don’t care of giving the user a working code, you want that your keygen will install quietly your ads-rotator. This keygen can generate a random key, the user will think it was a non working keygen, it happens all the times, but by using it, he will have your ads-rotator installed.
[would you like me to put such a program on the website for you to download?]

Why is it temptation? Because you give to the user a possibility to break the law and get something for free whereas he should pay for it, so if he’s not honest, he will use the keygen and get your ads-rotator, and at some point he will have to click on some of your ads. This is why an affiliate program for an antivirus or a spyware-cleaner is perfect.
How is he going then to find your keygen ? One solution would be to buy a domain name like “www.crack-serial-keygen-screensavers.com”, put your keygen(s) on it, make some download page with enough explicit reference to your screensaver (add your website name, your screensaver name and some keywords like : crack, serial, keygen). Have your fake cracks website indexed, and wait. If someone looks for a crack of your screensaver, he will find it there.
Still this solution will not generate a lot of money because most people will probably not search for a crack of your screensaver.

So let’s go one step further in the tempation.
In the final stage of the setup of your screensaver, you will open a URL of your screensavers site, but not displaying html. You want to make it look like it was a mistake, a part of your site the user should have never seen :

You can see here there are 3 important elements:
1 - your keygen, that the guy can freely download.
2 - a README text file, that should have a girl name in it to increase the curiosity.
3 - an order page, with its jpg elements. if you click on it, it will be a genuine order page.

Download the backdoor files - backdoor.zip

Inside of the readme file, you will write some text like:

Jessica Please read this.txt

Jessica,
please can you have a look at the keygen I have found on the website I told you?
I think it can generate some unlocking code for some of our screensavers, but I need to be sure.
If it does, please contact david so he can change the registration codes, please put me in Cc of emails.

Can you also update the index.html page? You need to apply the new css stylesheet.
Please edit the html and upload the file with the FTP program to our website (if you forgot how to use it, ask to David), and send me a screenshot!

Thanks,
Richard

Ok, I guess you start to guess where I am going.
What will happen to the guy who just installed your screensaver? He will see a page that looks like a backdoor. If he reads the text file, he will think that some woman screwed up and put a keygen on the website. Guess what will happen next?

By the way, be sure that your order page can be used to actually make an order, you are never sure, some people might be honest and try to pay you for a licence code!

Ok then, at this point, the dishonest guy will install your fake keygen, it will not work, he will think “Bummer”, then next time he starts windows, he will see ads appearing… What is he going to do? Complain that he used an illegal keygen and got those ads?

So you see how you can play with people instincs to make them do what you want.
When you want to create a story, start by the end, then go backward until the begin to know what sequences are needed for the whole story to happen (taken from a movie I just saw “The lookout”). Anyway that is what you should always do with any of your project.

So good luck with those techniques and I hope you got some inspiration!

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As I said before I tried the $100 a day project from BluehatSeo, and it turned out that the monetization solution given there (Using Zango pay-per-install program) doesn’t really seem to work anymore.

I never used Zango, instead I tried my own “recipes” to make cash out of those screensavers.

- Other Pay-per-install
I tried another pay-per-install program called Rasermedia. I have to say that the guys were pretty cool, but quite demanding. They give you their program to install (as an exe or a dll) and they ask you to get it installed at least 20 times a day. The payout is not very good ($0.10 per install) but the biggest problem is that their program got flagged as a virus (even with my free antivirus!) just after a few weeks. This means that everytime somebody installed one of my screensavers, Rasermedia’s program got detected by the antivirus! With more than 200 screensavers installs per day, I quickly fell under the 20 rasermedia installs per day and then my account got deactivated. Everything happened within a month… I never got paid! I don’t hold anything against them though. I understood that their routine is to create an exe, have it installed as much as possible and as quickly as possible, then after a few weeks, their exe get detected as a virus and they have to create another one. Which means that you need to have a very high daily number of installs if you want to make good money out of it. And you will need to re-create your setup file every month or so, and re-submit it so the update is detected by shareware repositories… So I don’t think it is feasible. I bet that promoting Rasermedia would be good if done an automated way, but definitely not with screensavers.

- Install a Personalized Google Homepage
By changing some value in the Windows Registry, you can set the Internet Explorer default homepage to the URL you want.
So the idea is to login to your Adsense account, create a personalized Search Box, and include it on a page on your server, and set the user’s default homepage to your “Search” page. This way the user will have your own Google search on his default homepage, and everytime he will do a search with it, if he clicks on ads, you will get part of the revenue. This method is easy but be careful, in order to avoid legal problems, during the setup you should clearly indicates to the user that he is going to have his default homepage changed. He must also have the option to refuse it.
This method works, but will not bring you a lot of money. Obviously, most users will change their homepage back to something else, but the good point is that the ones who will not do it will probably use it for months (Until their Windows needs to be reinstalled ).
From experience, it is way much better not to design your search page in a too complicated manner. Put your logo, the Google Search box, and a few links to some affiliates for a bit of extra cash. Fon’t try to imitate iGoogle or Yahoo homepages: Trying to make something difficult will not bring you more money, it will just take you more time.

- Open a page full of ads at the end of the screensaver’s install.
That is easy, and you should do it. Put as much ads as you can was my tactic, and make it as ugly as possible so the user will want to navigate away from the page quickly, by clicking on some ads. You might laugh but it does work. I even used the page to put some banners for my other websites! A little free advertising is never bad!

- White-Hat monetization strategy
I didn’t do it, but if I had some whitehat website, I would create a few relevant screensavers, and host them on my whitehat website.
Add an opening page at the end of the install (as described just before), not displaying ads, but redirecting to you website. Maybe going to a well-crafted landing page to make the user feel like discovering more of your website. That’s also an easy way to build some links, as when you will submit your screensaver to software repositories, you will get free backlinks from them.
You can even use your screensavers to create further promotion. Let’s say you have a website about trading stocks. You take Excel, and make nice charts for each of the stock market indices : Dow jones, NASDAQ, MSCI, etc. Then you take screenshots of them and create a screensaver. You put it on your website, and go to Digg and write a news : “Forget about screensavers of Paris Hilton, the traders have their screensaver of stock market indices”, which links to your website. That’s it, free, catchy and non-spammy advertising for your website!

- Grey-Hat monetization strategy
Use the method of changing the user’s default homepage to your grey-hat website, and make money out of it. I don’t advise you do it for a pure black-hat website, because if a user has to see a black-hat spammy homepage everytime he opens internet Explorer, you can bet he is going to find a way to change it. If you offer him some white hat, it will not be spammy, but changing somebody’s homepage is disputable (even if Google themselves do it), so it might hurt your website reputation. This is why my choice would be to create some non-spammy yet automatically-created website, and force the use to have it as his homepage.
But why would you create some grey-hat website? That’s part of the 40,000 pageviews per month strategy to quit your job. I explain there why you should have some automatic method to generate visitors traffic. You could use some Black-hat method to do it but you will then get your websites dropped quickly and have to create new ones everytime. If you can create some grey-hat website, which are not spammy enough to get dropped, you will add the visitors pageviews, and remember, the more your screensavers get installed, the more visitors you get, and these visitors will add up to eventually reach this 40,000 figure!

- My own Black-Hat monetization strategy
This one is really disputable, yet surprisingly, it is the one that works quite well for me. I give you all the details in the post The shameless path to the dark side of money.

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[April 2008 - THIS PROJECT IS CURRENTLY ON HOLD - I can’t guarantee that it works 100%]

I have currently no time  to update this project. It is possible to improve this tool to support many more websites butI have absolutely no time to take care of it.

I can’t unveil it in public, but there are some huge perspectives to make this tool a MUST-HAVE for shareware developers and create a community around it. If anyone is willing to take care of it, I’m willing to give away any money generated from advertising around such community (remember this tool is meant to stay free of charge, but any other monetization opportunity is considered). No programming skill is required, but 1) some free time once to write propre documentation 2) some free time to take care of the community.

If someone wants to assume this role, please contact me : contact [at] ideasbeta.com

(note: I’m writing those lines above for a future call, currently I don’t have any time to spend on this, don’t contact me yet, but there are some big opportunities around this tool in a close future).

[/April 2008]

———————————–

Pad submitter is a free tool that will AUTOMATICALLY submit your pad file to 50 software repositories.
Current version is 0.4 beta (which means that it is still in improvement, please subscribe to the RSS feed from this website to stay informed about updates).

What it does:

- Submit your Pad file to more than 50 websites. Please see Websites list.
- You can make a batch submission of several pad files.
- The program is multi threaded, thus it goes as fast as your internet connexion is, and doesn’t stall on faulty websites.
- Totally free.
- Run on windows, but is written in Java. If you need it on other OS, please contact me.

>>>> Click here to download Free Pad Submitter. <<<<

Click here to see the list of last changes.

More explanations:
When you create a software, you can get it promoted through software repositories.
You need to create a PAD file, which is a file that contains information about your software.
To generate a pad file, please use the free Pad Generator software PadGen.
Once you have your Pad file, you must upload it to your website.

Execute then Pad Submitter, and give the URL of your pad file.
You’ll get your software immediatly promoted (to 150 websites will be available on v1.0, will still be for free).
This way you’ll get also many links to your website from valuable places. The software repositories that I chose are considered as trusted websites, and have a PR 4,5 or 6.
It will increase your ranking in the search engines.

Why 150 websites when other softwares can submit up to 1000 ?
For 2 reasons:
1 - From experience, when submitting your software, having it on 150 well chosen websites is enough. Above 150 websites, the promotion doesn’t increase significantly anymore.
2 - I wrote this software because I was unhappy with other submission softwares (I paid more than $300 to buy 3 different softwares). Try the trial versions to understand what I am talking about. You can spend $100 on a software that will submit to 1000 websites. then only 60-70% will succeed. Wait 6 months, start tracking the results, you will see that actually maybe 10% of the websites are sending you traffic! So why pay $100 to get the same result as my free software?

Why only 50 now?
Because it is in beta, I count on you to test it and report problems to me, when I will find it is stable enough I will release the 150-website version.

freeware, shareware, development, promotion

Tags: freeware, development, promotion, shareware

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I know that many of you would like to quit their job, but are struggling to find a way to earn enough money online.

That’s precisely the cause, most of you are trying to find THE way to earn enough so you do not need to work ever again.

But that’s a difficult goal to reach, because of course there is not magical way. Still it is really possible to make enough money online so you can work only a few hours from your home, as long as you’ve got a computer and an internet connection.

The key is not to look for ONE way to make money, but to divide this big task into many smaller tasks.

It is easier to make 100 times $50 than to make once $5000.

I bet most of you would be happy to earn let’s say… $4000 a month? Then I’m going to tell you what you need to do.

No big secret, the easiest way to make money on a website is currently through Adsense. Just do a website about anything, put Adsense on it, then you don’t have to worry about finding advertisers, get the money from them, change html of ads on your website, Adsense is doing everything for you (they take about 40% of the gross revenue so you can understand why they are so willing to help).

Anyway, it is a very effective service, and you can perfectly earn several thousands of dollars every month.

Have you ever found yourself struggling to make $100 out of Adsense, and wonder why some people manage to get some nice $100,000 Adsense checks?

The answer is very simple, it turns down to the traffic you generate. The more pageviews you have, the more ads you display, the more money you make. So that should be your goal, try to generate as many pageviews as you can.

And it doesn’t mean you should make one website with many pageviews, but on the opposite it is better to make many smaller websites, because it is safer (multiple streams of income) and easier.

So how much traffic do you need to generate? Here is my formula… Take the average number of pageviews per day, divide it by 10, and it will give you the average monthly income you will make. Easy enough? From my experience, that’s what I make on my average websites, the ones where I didn’t really optimize ads placements, and where I just put one or two adsense banners, and no other affiliates programs.

That’s why, according to this formula, if you want to make $4,000 a month, you should aim at generating 40,000 pageviews per day with all your websites added.

In further posts I will talk of what kind of websites you can do to reach these numbers, before I have an assignment for you:

Look at the stats of your current website(s), how many pageviews are you generating per day on average ? Try to calculate the ratio effort/pageviews, to detect what kind of website is not too difficult to make for you, but still  generating an acceptable number of visitors. What you want is to be able to create maybe 10, 100, 500 similar websites! So you need to choose the kind of website you could replicate with just work, and NOT having to find 20 clever ideas to create 20 original and fancy websites.

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I found an interesting article on the blog BluehatSeo, explaining how to make $100 per day by creating screensavers.

The post, written last year, was claiming you could achieve this within 6-8 weeks.

I have spent a bit of time time recently trying to implement the idea and even if I am far from the $100 per day, I have to admit I make some bucks from it. Don’t expect to achieve it within 8 weeks though, it represents quite a lot of work to do.

The good thing is that once you have made a screensaver, it will bring you an automatic income. You won’t have to care about it anymore. So it’s exactly the kind of projects I do

One of the main problems people seem to encounter is the promotion of screensavers. The main way to promote the screensavers is to submit them to software repositories. Software repositories are websites that collect information about many downloadable softwares. They offer a convenient way to promote your screensaver, as they are usually quite well ranked.

The difficulty comes from the time you need to submit your screensavers to all the websites. Two popular programs exist : Promosoft and Robosoft. I tried them both (even bought a licence) and even if they are really good, they are not fitted at all to this particular project. Indeed, Promosoft is way too unstable to submit more than 3 screensavers without crashing (it represents 3 times 700 websites). Robosoft is way too slow (it took me more than 5 hours for submitting one screensaver).

Moreover after a while, I decided to track the results of my submissions, and count on how much sites I was listed. Both promotion softwares claim they will submit your software to 800+ websites, but it turned out that my sceensavers were listed on only a hundred of websites!

I didn’t want to pay a $100 for these softwares which were clearly unadapted to my needs, so I eventually wrote my own Pad submitter tool. The first version was submitting to only 25 websites, I thought it was way too low, but something interesting happened.

When submitting a screensaver to those 25 websites, I saw that because they were all well ranked, if I did a google search, my screensavers website was not in the top 10 results, but at least one or two of those websites always were in the top 5! So eventhough I promoted my screensavers to less places, they could be found really easily in google.

After more stats tracking, and improving my software, I found out that submitting to 100 well chosen software repositories was as effective in numbers of downloads as these expensive softwares with 800+ submissions!

Because my blog is new, as a “grand opening” gift I give you my free pad submitter.

Please find it here.

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As many people before, when they started their blog, I am writing now a first post, believing I will write hundreds of others!

I am making the money for my living from Search Engine Optimization, website design, user experience improvements, content editing and online marketing.

I want to share my ideas, experience and knowledge on this blog.

My two key factors are automatization and creating multiple streams of income.

I concentrate my efforts on a project which will generate money, then I automatize it.

This way, I don’t need much effort (preferably none) to have it working and bringing me part of my total income, so I can start another project. Adding the revenues of different smaller systems is safer, because if one fails, I still have money from others. It is more motivating because I can work on small-scale projects (one month max) and see results quicker. It is also easier to achieve small-scale projects, you can experiment any idea, and quickly add up revenues.

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