OK so I know toolbars are looked down upon by a lot of people since there are many out there that just feed your computer with spyware and track all of your actions without your knowledge. Well recently I came across a company called Conduit which is very safe and does not track any information (unless you tell it too, but then the privacy feature of your toolbar download page is removed). This changed everything for one of my newer and favorite websites picpanda.com, but I’m not talking about that site today (well not completely). After checking out some information and reading about how it works, privacy and so forth I decided to make a toolbar of my own.
My 3 Steps involved
1. It was easy to make at the beginning by just picking and choosing what you want to put on it, website name, logo, custom links and much more.
2. From there I installed the toolbar to see how it looked and worked. It worked very nicely on both firefox and internet explorer. I have yet to try it on any other browser. One very cool feature it has is when you make updates to your toolbar they will automatically show up on the users end without them having to re-install anything.
3. I noticed my logo (just text) was too boring and plain so I made a quick logo and quickly realized how hard it was to incorporate this into the toolbar. It took me about 15 tries of different transparencies to get it to work right without distorting the image. Also their upload for images is VERY slow, even for images as small as 10kb, but perhaps it takes a while to incorporate it into the toolbar and update it.
Make money
Heres a cool feature I did not find out about until after I started using the toolbar is that you can make some decent money from it. Basically how it works is they use Google search on the toolbar which they give you a portion of the earnings from searches done by your users. It isn’t much but they estimate if you have 2,500 active users you can earn over $775.00 per month.
I have yet to update the toolbar since I made it (about a month ago) but I am still pleased with it so far and the amount of users is steadily increasing daily.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Great post.
I’m setting up my first Conduit toolbar.
I saw the option to add a google search box into the Conduit toolbar. Do I need to register with google to get money from searches using the box, or does Conduit take care of that?
Any other way of monetizing the toolbar? I heard of pay-per-install models, including affiliate links etc., but couldn’t get any valued information.
Any other advice would be welcome…
Thanks again for the post!
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