Getting Traffic by Distributing Screensavers
One really easy way to generate web traffic and interest for your site is of course to give away free stuff. Even if it’s not free, but very cheap, screensavers can be a very attractive draw for your site visitors and potentially for new visitors.
What’s more is that if you can list your screensaver in free software directories you will also get backlinks from them which will help your search engine rankings and you will get traffic both directly from the software directory sites and indirectly from increased search rankings due to more inbound links.
You might be thinking that you’ll need to take time to learn programming. No. Expensive software to buy? No. Really all you really need are some pictures, an internet connection (I’m assuming you’ve already got that one covered), and a few free software downloads. The pictures have to be such that you can redistribute them. So, if they’re not pictures you have taken yourself read carefully the fine print. There are many sources of free imagery online, it’s tricky to find some with no strings attached on the redistribution. I’ll leave that as an exercise for later.
Free software step one:
IrfanView. From version 3.70 on, Irfanview supports creating screensaver files from a set of images. Irfanview is free. I downloaded an older version from this link at oldversion.com mainly because I use linux and the new version of irfanview doesn’t run under wine. You can download the latest greatest irfanview from here. If you’re really lost on creating the screensaver, look at this page it has some good details about using irfanview as a slideshow generator. The main difference is that instead of a standalone exe you want to create an .scr file.
Free Software step two:
Installer. It would really look professional if you have a nice standalone exe to install your screensaver and then remove it when someone wants to uninstall. So, you might look at innosetup it’s a free program to create a windows installer for a program you would like to have someone install. You essentially tell it what programs you want to include, where you want them to be installed to (c:\windows\system is the place for screensaver files so they show up in your display/screensavers list.) It will generate an .exe file which is your setup file.
Free Software step three and four:
Create a PAD file. I don’t know why, it doesn’t really matter, but most online software directories require PAD files with software submissions. They are basically a file describing the publisher, the software, the link to the homepage of the software and a few other bits of information. A good free PAD generator is PadCreator. It will help you create a PAD file and even distribute the file to over 400 software directories (that’s part of step 4.)
Submit your software – step four:
We’ve already looked a bit at this with the submission that Pad creator does. Realistically though there are other possibilities to submit your software. You can do it manually, you can find other programs that claim to submit to 1000+ software directories. I haven’t found any other free PAD submitters that I’m recommending here yet, but I may. I’ve also found some tools that claim to submit to the directories that DON’T require PAD files. (I’ve seen Promosoft recommended, it’s a pay utility and I haven’t used it firsthand.)
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