I have to say that the one year old Eli’s post about screensavers is still very popular, I often receive questions about it.
Please find below some interesting snippets of the answers I have given by email.

“I don’t use pay-per-install anymore, they are just spyware so, morality put aside, they are worthless because they eventually get detected by antiviruses… Which means that you could get blacklisted but even if you’re not, most people will have a warning from their antivirus when they try to install your screensavers… I had that and it really “killed” the site where I had all the screensavers with spywares… Even after I re-created all the screensavers to remove the PPI and still today the downloads numbers are low…
Installing it at reboot is worthless as well, I tried it, but my antivirus could even detect there was the PPI INSIDE my screensaver setup exe!!! So even when I clicked on my website to download the screensaver, I had a big “warning” from my antivirus and could not even download it… Someone told me that changing the signature of the PPI exe could make it invisible to antiviruses… I didn’t try it because at this point, I didn’t want to lose time with PPI anymore…
Monetizations options are pretty summed up in my blog… Changing the homepage, Open a page full of ads at the end of the screensaver’s install, using the pop-up generator to have ads on the user homepage. These are what is working best for me.”

“The calculation is easy… XXXXXXXX (PPI program, sorry for hiding the name) is just a program that display popups… With a good CPM sponsor, you can make around $4 per 1000 pageviews, which is $0.004 per pageview. After 25 pagesviews, you earn $0.10, which is what they pay you on average to have their exe installed. Remember that $0.45 is paid only for US traffic, the rest is paid less if nothing.
I bet they manage to open their 25 popups within the first half hour of use… It took me several hours to figure how to get rid of their spyware, and believe me I’m not the average windows user.
I would advise you to use my popup generator code (given in my post Shameless path to the dark side of money), install it during the screensaver setup.”
By the way, if you do this technique, please use my aff link when you subscribe to it: advertising365
“Well if you hesitate about which monetization strategy to choose, just do like me… get 2 websites!
You can then try to experiment different strategies on each website, and if one gets flagged, you will not lose everything, just repack the screensavers, put it on your non-flagged website, and you can even reopen a new second website to experiment another strategy!”

“On the “thank you” page I created, I went really blackhat: I put the CPM sponsor so I am sure to get some money, I did a horrible design (like flashy green and pink), except for the adsense box which has normal colors. The idea is to push the user to click on adsense because the page is too ugly and he wants to navigate away from it. Believe me this works good. On this page I put some text related to screensavers and a high paying keywords so adsense displays high paying ads (you can find a list of high paying keywords by a simple google search)
Finally I put a Adultfriendfinder ad on the page and it brings me a bit of extra cash.”

“DO put in your installer the option for the user to set or not the toolbar/ie start page. I know it is mandatory by the law. You could get in trouble if you don’t do it. But do like me, in your installer, get all installation options on one page. And put the toolbar/other options folded and ticked. Give them a generic name ( e.g. “install google page”)
99% of users will just click on “next” and not read what are all the options.”

“Regarding success, yes I have some, but it took me a lot of time, definitely this is not a project you want to do without automation, the good thing is that I did my first screensaver last year and it still brings me some money… So for now, when I look at the time I spent, I think it is not so profitable. But I would say that if it holds another extra year, then yes it was worth the time spent.

Reaching $100 a day with this project is very hard, if you intend to put the effort to reach that figure, there are more profitable project you can spend your time on.

But if you’re just looking for an extra $1000 a month, that’s doable.”

Tags: blackhat, monetization, online marketing, grayhat, SEO, make money

Share This

Hi everybody,

I have opened the private section for the project “Make money by creating your newsletter“.

Subscription is FREE, but LIMITED.

In the private section, I am sharing more powerful tricks to increase the effectiveness (and reduce the effort) of the project. You can guess that I can’t release the tricks openly, otherwise they would get spoiled, and would become useless.

If you want to be part of the private section, hurry-up, send an email to nlproject@ideasbeta.com

Note: Sorry, enough people have already answered and the subscription is closed.

Also, I am about to share some of my private ressource on another private section, stay tuned! It will be some powerful suff I use for one of my main sources of income : The 40,000 pageviews a day goal. I reached this goal since a while, and now, the infos/scripts and tools I used are mature enough to be shared with a few people who are really motivated to make it this year.

Tags: blackhat, grayhat, online marketing, SEO, make money, monetization

Share This

First of all I wish you a happy and successful new year.

Since I started my blog, I have often received emails of people asking for help, they were trying to make money on the internet, but were unsuccessful.
This is a real problem for many, you can get a lot of information on how to make money, but usually, there is too much overload, and it is difficult to find THE way to achieve it. It always seems like a race to find THE information that will make you rich.
So let me give you the big secret.

To make money on the internet you have two choices :
- either you know THE place or THE people that will give you THE secret,
- or you jump in the swimming pool, and learn to swim.

The first one is not impossible, but it will take you time anyway. Don’t expect people leaking out their big secrets for nothing, unless you happen to be the best friend of one of those people, but even then, you’re in a bad position because when THE big secret will not be “hot” anymore, you will be helpless to make money.
So you can spend the time to “network”, and with time you will “virtually” meet the ones who can give you good tips, but anyway, at this point you will have to be good too, and also be able to give other people nice tips. So, in the end, it is not more different than the second choice : jump in the pool, and learn to swim.
And this is where most people are failing, they read a lot of information, but they never put their mind into one project, so they read, try something for a while, fail, and repeat.
Even worse, many people actually NEVER start to work on one project, they will find a thousand excuses, that’s exactly like when you want to stop smoking all year long but never start it.

The internet is like the gold rush era… Anyone can be successful, it doesn’t depends on your family, your relations, your skin color… But you can’t expect to dig a bit and immediately find big nuggets!

So the first big secret to be successful in making money on the internet is… Start a project! Yes, read it again: Start a project. You can read a zillion blogs with great ideas, but you’ll only get the USEFUL knowledge with EXPERIENCE. So, whatever you might think, even if a project seems totally out-of-date, just start it now because even if you don’t make money, you’ll get experience. And little by little, you’ll get the good knowledge, you’ll start to know the tricks, the people, share ideas, make money and then it’s a virtuous circle: you’ll make more and more money, until you’re one of the $50K+ a month club.
But you must start today.

The second secret to really make it, and this is probably the most important is to be CONSISTENT. Don’t give up too quickly on one project. Usually it takes months before you start to really get results. I know everybody wants everything fast “yeah I’m on a diet to lose 8 pounds a month”, come on, GET REAL, how do you see yourself in exactly one year? Do you want to have some money-making online business, or still be searching for THE great idea?

The third big secret, is: don’t forget that the internet is huge, the sky’s the limit.
Not every project is profitable, but when you make money with one, try to EXPAND it.
I do myself the mistake of working on new projects regularly, instead of taking my successful projects and expanding them. I can do it, because I can afford it, but for most of you, you want to make enough in order to pay your bills first. When you will have several profitable money-making machines, you can allow you to digress like I do and have fun on new projects, but FIRST create ONE good source of income.
The very good advantage with the internet is that it is GLOBAL and it is HUGE, and it with the same amount of effort, your earnings don’t add, they multiply. It might take you 3 months before you make $1 a day, but with the same effort on the same project, it will take you another 3 months to make maybe $10 a day, and 3 months later you could be doing $50-$100 a day. Within next year you could reach the $500-$1000 a day if you’re consistent enough. I am not joking. But most of people will not put the consistency into one project, and many will not even really start it.

Much later, you can start to think about multiple streams of income, but not now, first get ONE good project, and do it to the max.

I found an interesting idea in another blog: instead of choosing good resolutions for this new year, you should choose only ONE WORD which will guide you through the year. I think this is great, and to paraphrase it, I’ll ask you to choose ONE project and do it all year long. You might try other projects IN PARALLEL, but don’t give up on this one project during 2008. Take any you want, maybe one that you wanted to do since ages, or a new one that you find exciting, don’t worry to know if it is “hot stuff” or “so 2005″, just start it and put some effort into it.
And come back in one year to tell me how much you’ve earned.

So, as promised, I have detailed in my last post the project idea I’ve worked on, I tried to be creative, twist some ever-working ideas and update them with some recent strategies, my starting point was to find an idea that a beginner could do, without investing any money.
More seasoned people will already have ideas to improve it, and also there are a few hot tips that would make the system much more efficient, but I can’t reveal them openly, so I’ll create another “private” project, like I did with the adult blogs project. I will limit the subscriptions to 40 people, and IT WILL BE FREE, just like the adult blog project. But don’t worry, even if you are not part of it, you can take the public information, do the project and make money with it. It is just that I have to limit some tips to a limited number of people or they would become useless… Stay tuned!

And let’s get working!

Tags: blackhat, online marketing, make money, SEO, monetization, grayhat

Share This