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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