Around the same time that I built the Submission-Spider Search Engine Submission Software, I built the Award-Me! Award Submission software at Award-Me.com.

I owned a few web sites and figured out that if I submitted them to some cheesy web awards, I could get a nice little bump in traffic. I ran into the same problem as the search engines…submitting your site to hundreds of awards by hand took forever.

So I built some software to automate it, again using Visual Basic and a little Perl. The software submitted to around 300 different web awards, automatically, and nearly instantly…well in a couple of minutes at least.

I initially started selling it for around $15 if memory serves. I ran ads in webmaster newsletters and was able to get a pretty awesome conversion ratio so that every dollar I spent in advertising brought in several dollars in income.

The software was a win.

But I got distracted with some other project and started to neglect Award-Me. At $15, even with profitable advertising in place I wasn’t going to make millions of dollars off the thing so I eventually lost interest.

Plus you really had to keep the list of awards updated, and that was a very tedious thing to do. These days I’d write a simple php script and throw up a cron job to do it all automatically but back then I was a less sophisticated programmer and web automation wasn’t what it is today. Perl User Agents would sort of get the job done but it was still an ordeal.

And hiring someone to keep the database of awards up to date would have put a serious dent in the profit margins…so I reduced the price to free, and used the leads to funnel customers over to my Submission-Spider software using a series of autoresponder messages sent out after people download the award software.

I probably made more money selling the Submission-Spider to those people than I would have selling them Award-Me software…sure I could have done both, but whatever.

Over time the database of awards shrunk down to the point where it was embarrassing to even give away for free, so I took the download link down. The website still exists…maybe I’ll do something with it some day.

Everyone likes to win awards!