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!

Share This