Making Money using web based proxy website

You might think proxies are a thing of a past or just sites people make in order to get a dollar a month extra in their Google Adsense account. I thought that at first, then I started making a few and boy was I wrong. My first month with proxies, well
my first 10 days with proxies I’ve made more than the cost of the four .COM
domains I started out with so make your own conclusions.
what is Proxy 2.0(nothing to do with web2.0)?
The idea for the name for Proxy 2.0 actually came from my favourite proxy forum
(ProxyUsers) and a cool member over there named ‘weput’. The thread was looking
at translating proxies into other languages in order to be able to get more interest in them, basically a new look at marketing proxies. With web 2.0 a huge term I decided
to call this completely free Proxy e-book Proxy 2.0 as it's looking at the current state
of how to setup a proxy, how to build traffic and links and how to make money so hopefully you’ll enjoy this free guide and follow along as we make money with
proxies!


One of the reasons to start this article is to give back to the readers of our Web
Proxy Blog (WebProxyBlog), give them all the information that’s due to come on our blog and just basically a nice resource that you can print out and take to read
anywhere, maybe even in your break at work. If you didn’t receive this from the
owners of WebProxyBlog.com i.e. found this available on another website then please contact us and let us know. We will be looking into the following:
· Proxy Domains ~ Which domains you can use to start a proxy and ideas and tips that you should know before you splash the cash on hundreds of those
.info’s.
· Proxy Scripts ~ There's two main Proxy Scripts out there for you to choose from and we look at the positives and negatives in them all!
· Proxy Hosting ~ Arguably the biggest outgoing in a proxy network and
something that you must get right and have in place if you are going to be a successful proxy network owner
· Building Backlinks to your Proxy ~ People Search thousands of terms
daily in order to get a proxy they can use, yours should be found as well and we look at how you can build backlinks to do just that
· On Page Proxy Optimisation ~ There's not a great deal you can do to a one page proxy but there are some things so take a look.
· How to get Traffic to your proxy ~ A long list of tips and tricks in order to generate traffic to your proxy websites
· Proxy Monetisation ~ You’ve got the traffic, but where’s the money?
· Resources ~ A list of links to resources mentioned in this guide
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IT is important to add here that first of all you decide

1.Are you going to by a ready to use proxy website ?
or

2. You want to start your own


BUYING A WEBSITE: On Internet you can find many good website which are profit making
but are sold for various reasons. So if you want your earnin straigt by buying a ready made website there are many website

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=519175

digital point forum . sitepoint.com

for making your own the details are as follows


Proxy Domains
Now then, there are many routes you can take when picking proxy domains believe
it or not and we are going to look at them.
Route 1
Route1 is an option few people tend to take; it's basically getting quality domains
that are brandable (.com’s) and working hard to market them and optimise them in order to get them well established and earning good money individually. An example
of this is the Privax network which has proxies such as ‘BoratProxy’ and ‘HideMyAss’
which are very brandable and easy for people to remember. Note that .com’s are more expensive then some of the other extensions so keep your budget in mind
Route 2
Route2 is often taken by people who just have a bunch of random domains lying around and want to monetize them so decide to setup a proxy in their words too
‘make a few bucks’. This often includes domains like LLLL (letters) in extensions like
.com and .net and these domains are often unpronounceable. People like this tend not too show much interest in their proxies and it certainly isn’t easy for people to
remember the name without Bookmarking the site so bare that in mind if you are
serious about your proxy venture.
Route 3
Route3 is either used by people who are very clever and know that mass in numbers works well with proxies and can drive big traffic or people who are cheap (or have a low budget) and are just testing the water. You guessed it, im talking about the .info
extension. People register hundreds of these things, and if you can get them all
setup and with a bit of traffic to each you should be able to easily cover the cost of the hosting that hosts them all!
Route 4
Route4 is the experimental route, get any type of domain, .com, .info, .net it doesn’t really matter, have some brandable and have some spammy looking domains. As
long as they are making money who cares?
OK so some of these routes may look a little stereotypical but there are people who just concentrate on a certain route hence why there were mentioned here and
hopefully it gives you a good idea of the options you have available to you. Of course it's not just the proxy extension that you have to think about but the actual name
itself which we look at briefly on the following page. By all means follow the route
you feel will bring you the most money no matter whether people think it's spammy
or not, do proxy users care? Well that’s something you'll find out with your own testing and tweaking to see what works best for you so that you can replicate it.


How to decide on Domain Names
By now you should know whether you want a tonne of .info’s, to use some domains you already have or created some brandable domains for proxies that people will remember, or just use a mix of everything. With that knowledge looking into which domains to buy will be different from the rest of the options.
Brandable
If you are looking for your proxies to be brandable and be remembered without them just having to be bookmarked then first of all you should be looking at .Com domains although it may ‘seem’ like the good ones have ran out. That’s why I suggest you
build your own brand with an ending of the domains that sound the same to build your network. For example all the main domains in our network end with ‘oxy’ so that they are brandable for our network and people can relate to them and remember them.
Bulk
You will realise there's a time you’ve got a tonne of proxies and may wonder why you spent all the money on .coms which are 10x the price of .info’s if you shop on
NameCheap (recommended). If you are looking to bulk up your network or start with
a lot of proxies from the beginning then I recommend you buy .info's as they are a
heck of a lot cheaper and still do the job just the same. Don’t listen to those who say you can’t rank well in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) with them.
It's up to you!
At the end of the day it's your network, it's your proxies and it's your money you are spending. Make your mind up about which direction you want to go and get ready to get setup!



Proxy Scripts
I'm going to be honest here and let you know that there are only 2 commonly used proxy scripts and they are PHProxy and CGIProxy, basically one of them is a PHP Proxy and the other is a CGI proxy if you can’t tell from the names. They both have their advantages and disadvantages so here's to looking at them to help you decide which to use, but first things first and here's the good news:
They’re both free
PHProxy
Website Description: PHProxy is a Web HTTP proxy programmed in PHP to bypass firewalls and other proxy restrictions through a Web interface very similar to the popular CGIProxy. School/country/company blocked your favorite Website? Look no further! The server that this script runs on simply acts as a medium that retrieves resources for you. The only IP address shown will be the server's IP address. So basically, it is indirect browsing. The only catch being that the server has to have access to those otherwise inaccessible resources.
Advantages:
· Completely free, just a download required
· Setup in minutes, just upload the files to your server and its ready to use
· Has lots of themes available Free on the internet
· Well known and simple to use
Disadvantages:
· Uses up a lot of bandwidth
· Default theme is pretty ugly
· Cant login to certain websites
· Checkboxes are not that simple to remove



PHProxy is what I use on all of my websites (proxies) and it has done me no harm or had any real issues. The only thing I don’t like about it is the checkboxes and the
fact there’s no quick solution to removing them and I couldn’t really find a decent
guide on the internet so something Im going to have to look into more. Just because
I use PHProxy doesn’t mean you have too so heres a look at CGI Proxy on the following Page.
CGI Proxy
Website Description: This CGI script acts as an HTTP or FTP proxy. Through it, you
can retrieve any resource that is accessible from the server it runs on. This is useful when your own access is limited, but you can reach a server that in turn can reach others that you can't. In addition, the user is kept as anonymous as possible from
any servers. Common uses include: anonymous proxies similar to The Anonymizer, other personal uses, VPN-like functionality, and others. It's very simple to install,
and very configurable.
When an HTML resource is retrieved, it's modified so that all links in it point back through the same proxy, including images, form submissions, and everything else. Once you're using the proxy, you can browse normally and (almost) forget it's there.


Advantages:
· Uses up less bandwidth than PHProxy
· Quick and easy to setup
· Simple to use, just upload the files, type in the web address and go
· Allows login to most websites


Disadvantages:
· Uses a lot of CPU Processing power
· Need a server that can run the CGI Proxy (may need to be configured whereas most Linux servers have PHP automatically)
If Im honest I've never fully utilized this proxy and some of the disadvantages may not be fully true as they are not from personal experience just from ‘the talk of the web’. Give it a try and see what you think.


Some others
Of course there are other scripts out there, heres some links to others you may want
to check out:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=242553PHP Proxy Script
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=289029&highlight=zelune


Proxy Hosting
As mentioned in the introduction to the e-book on the section about what might be included, proxy hosting is something that is vital to the success of your proxy
network and is certainly an important backbone. There's a few types of hosting which we are going to be looking at, we are rarely going to link to actual companies as Im
currently only using Dedicated Hosting so cant recommend that many and really
shouldn’t if I haven't used them personally but will have at least 1 link for each type
of hosting options. The following list may look like a guide into what you should look for in general hosting but read it carefully as it’s very much targeted towards proxy
hosting.
There are many reasons it’s important to get the right type of hosting for your proxy and heres a few of them:
· Speed ~ You need your proxies to be quick, if they are slow then people aren’t going to want to use them and with there being thousands of other proxies freely available then why is someone going to choose your proxy which is slower than another one which is much quicker. This only really
matters if the site is VERY SLOW so decent speeds should be enough for your visitors.
· Cost ~ There’s no point shelling out $209 a month on the best dedicated server you can find if you’re not bringing in enough money to support in via
online work. I recommending having at least $50-100 profit from the proxies
on top of a server plan so that you are still earning money and even if you have a bad month you should have enough funds to pay for your server.
· Reliability ~ If people visit your proxy and its not working, it wont be bookmarked and that person wont be coming back, and that’s 99% certain.
Uptime is an important factor of hosting that you need to look into and you should also look into servers that can handle the amount of proxy sites that
you are looking to add to the server.
· TOS ~ There's one issue with proxies that hasn’t been mentioned and that’s the TOS (Terms of Service) of many hosts. It’s not just a Google search for
‘Cheap Hosting’ or ‘Shared Hosting’ that’s going to find you a cheap host that will allow you to run a proxy. This is due to the large amount of resources a
proxy can use and the sometimes illegal activities that proxy websites are used for. Check out the likes of DigitalPoint Forums and Sitepoint for people
offering cheap proxy hosting.



Over the following page we will be highlighting the types of hosting available for proxies and providing examples of where to find hosting for each. Make sure you keep a budget in mind as its oh-so easy to add that extra funding for a little extra
ram or a little extra web space, something which you need very little off (web space)
when running a proxy so keep that in mind, without further ado…
Shared Hosting
It’s very rare to find a good shared hosting company that is going to allow you to run
a proxy. From my reviews looking into shared proxy hosting I found that
Dreamhost
will allow the hosting of CGI Proxies depending on how much server load they are taking up but the best bet is too look on the likes of DigitalPoint Forums in order to
find members offering deals, likely from those who are renting out servers.


Advantages:
· Cheaper than other hosting options
· Should come with basic Cpanel / Plesk for easy setup



Disadvantages:
· Likely to be slower due to more sites on the server
· With ‘random people’ offering hosting you don’t have the uptime or backup security like you do with well known companies
VPS Hosting
VPS servers (Virtual Private Servers) are basically one main server split into many
‘virtual servers’. These are often use by proxy webmasters as they are cheaper than dedicated hosting and offer better features and power over shared hosting. A host I recommend VPS wise for proxy hosting was recommended by a friend and that is VPSLand who seem to offer some very affordable hosting prices.
Advantages:
· More power and resources than shared hosting
· Cheaper than dedicated hosting
Disadvantages:
· Limited to the number of proxies that can be hosted
· Have less power than Dedicated Servers
Dedicated Hosting
I personally use dedicated hosting and had used shared hosting for a proxy so now
Im with a managed dedicated host I can certainly recommend Dedicated Hosting as the best option for running proxy websites if you can afford it. I recommend Helix Development for this as they are my current host.
Advantages:
· Lots of power and resources
· Only have your websites on the server to do as you please
Disadvantages:
· Costly, more expensive than other forms of hosting
· To have them managed you have to pay even more



Round-Up
Hopefully this section about Proxy Hosting has helped you learn more about the
options you have available to you for hosting your proxy network and the benefits of what the higher price bracket can do, but obviously at a cost. I personally believe
that people should start on a VPS, possibly with money that they have earned offline and once the proxies start earning money can either continue to fund the VPS
servers via online earnings or upgrade to dedicated hosting if profits permit.
Picking a host is a very important decision so make sure you ask around, don’t even take my options as the best options available but at least consider them and then speak to them, tell them what you plan on hosting and see if they can accommodate you just to be sure.
Building Backlinks to Your Proxy
I won’t lie and I will let you know that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is my
‘thing’ so I’ll try not to get too ahead of myself and just stay with the basic ideas to build backlinks to your proxy. You may be wondering why you would want to build backlinks to your proxy, you just submit to top sites, add some buttons in your
footer and your done, right? Wrong! In order to get good relevant traffic to your
proxies it’s a good idea to have SEO in mind so that you can rank for proxy related keywords and get constant traffic to your site, the best way to increase your search engine rankings is by building backlinks to your site so heres a look at how to do just that. Note: Your links should be including the anchor text for the keywords you want
to rank for, make sure you do some keyword research and don’t just guess:
1. Submit to Topsites – OK, this may be a little unethical but you can submit
to topsites and get a free link from everyone, remember that you are supposed to link back to them though ;)
2. Signature Footers – When posting on forums there's always someone
around who is looking for a good proxy. Why not put your site in your signature (some good places to look will be in our resources section).
3. MySpace Profiles – The great thing about MySpace is that the majority of
the people who are going to use it are going to be the type of people who are going to use proxies at home / school / college. Create a profile for your
proxies and leave comments or messages that give people this helpful information. Every link counts
4. Submit to Directories – Im honestly not sure whether directories accept proxies but if there's a category for it then you can be sure they will. Im yet
to try this but plan too for my network very soon. Use the anchor text for which you want to rank in the Search Engines as the title.
5. Write Articles – While this may seem like the most boring of the tactics I've
actually found good results. You can use your authors box to include a link back to your sites and if picked up it could be a lot of backlinks your gaining from one simple 400 word article.
6. Link Exchanges – These are pretty low down my basic link of building backlinks to your proxy as I don’t value them highly simply because the
Search Engines don’t value them highly. Basically you link to someone else’s
site if they offer to link to yours in return. You can find forums that offer sections for discussing such exchanges
7. Linkbaiting – If done right this is the most effective way to build links.
Basically its doing something (most likely unique) in order for people to link to your site. This could be something like a unique tool or a free website design
for a proxy that people can use.
On Page Proxy SEO
With the previous page mentioning how to build backlinks we have the off page optimisation stuff sorted out, but now we need to look at On Page Optimisation. We will assume that you have already done keyword research and know which terms
you want to rank highly in the Search Engines for (proxy related). Im going to be honest and say that proxies aren’t the best sites to optimise as they only have 1 or 2 pages on them so if you have the time to add a few articles or even an abuse / tos
page then its going to be better than a single page website. Besides that heres some tips


Title Tag
First of all, make sure your keyword / key phrases are the first word(s) in your title tag followed by your site name. This gives them more strength as they are at the front of the title tag, the less words you have in there the better. Too many people mistakenly use the title tag to descript what there website is about. Please bare in mind that the title tag is what people click on from the SERP’s (Search Engine
Results Pages) when your site appears so keep it simple, and attractive.
Meta Tags
Believe it or not, the importance of these in SEO these days is not very important
but there are worth having all the same. Put some keywords in the keywords meta field (you may have to add this to PHProxy code), no more than 10 words and enter
a description about the site, keeping it brief but remember it will be seen by people who find your site on the SERP’s so keep it relevant.


(h1) Tags
I've seen the effect of these to be very positive over the years from my own experience so Im going to add here that anywhere under the ads on your site add your keywords in (h1) tags for e.g.(

Web Proxy

). These are more effective near the header but its likely your going to want it lower down.
On Page Content
Just because your proxy is only one page, doesn’t mean you can’t have any text to
go with all those ads. In fact its even recommended just because of the relevancy targeting from Google Adsense and keeps your site looking less like it was made for
ads. In the footer just add a unique paragraph of text for each of your sites, maybe
even bolding your keywords in that paragraph.
301 Redirect
What? I hear you say in a puzzled look, or Why? for some of you. But I really think you should 301 redirect the non-www (http://domain.com) version of your proxy to
the www version (http://www.domain.com). If you plan on creating proxies just to sell then it may not be worth doing so, but if you are serious about proxies and
owning them yourself and building up your network then you should consider tasks
which revolve around Search Engine Optimisation and building traffic to your proxy websites via search engines. So then why would we want to redirect the non-www version of our site to the www version?
· Remove the issue of duplicate pages, as both pages will be exactly the same
· Spread the power of all that ‘link love’ to one place
· Pass PR better (Important if you plan to sell sites)
So, how do you do it?
Firstly you need to open up a text editor and add this: Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
Remember to change domain.com with your actual domain. Save the file as
.htaccess (don’t forget the .) and upload the file to your site root. Voila you’ve now redirected your non-www version of your site to the www version. If this isn’t
working for you just put up in the comments and well help resolve the issue.
There wasn’t much too it, but there you have it. There are only so many tips for a
one page website. You don’t have to worry about URL’s, linking structure, sitemaps etc unless you have a few pages.
How to get Traffic to your Proxy
Some of this may seem the same as building links to your proxy as some of the methods work both as a benefit for traffic and as a benefit for proxy traffic so just
bare that in mind. This is just going to be a long list so you can skim through or you can read each one and apply them to your traffic building methods.
1. Submit to Topsites, Topsites do actually bring traffic to your website, you
will have to determine the quality of that traffic yourself as there's arguments on both sides of the story
2. Add your links to forum signatures. I have a link to our Web Proxy Blog
on DigitalPoint and it’s brought quite a lot of traffic to the Blog that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
3. Post a bulletin on MySpace. MySpace has the perfect demographic of users that are likely to use your proxy so there's not much better traffic then the
American visitors you can send from over there
4. Tell your friends / kids. Depending on your age, either tell your friends
about the site or tell your kids or your friends’ kids to pass it around school. I
study part time and work as an SEO part time so it’s not hard for me to get the word out even though we have very strict filters.
5. Stumbleupon. Stumble your own website on Stumbleupon or better yet start
a forum thread somewhere offering to exchange stumbles. The result can be amazing
6. Tag Technorati. If you have any Technorati keywords related to your site
that are popular on there add them to your site and ping Technorati for some quick traffic
7. SEO. Although this is normally long term traffic I was ranking 2nd for
Unblockable Proxy in 48 hours and received 15 visitors on the first day, better than nothing, right?
8. Buy Blog Posts. There's plenty of blog’s teens visit or even just to get some adults to find out about the site for use at work, buy some cheap Blog posts
from the likes of ReviewMe or PayPerPost.
9. Comment on MySpace Groups. There's a few proxy groups on myspace that you may find beneficial to join and start a thread on (don’t spam
though).
10. Post on Craigslist. This may sound quite stupid but if you think about it, posting in the erotic section and places like that people will likely visit your site. This is because people tend to visit those types of sites when using a proxy.
11. Own Your Name. Hopefully this one is a little different to what you generally see on these types of lists but it’s very simple. Take up all the web presence
you can in terms of those free sites like blogger, wordpress and typepad and
signup with the name of your site, you secure you’re branding but you also get a free link. Make 1 or two unique posts about the niche in each and that
link will become that much stronger.
Monetising your Proxy
Now that we have our domain, we have our hosting, we have our traffic (hopefully), it's time to monetise that traffic and monetise our proxy! The fun part. Well actually,
it's not so fun setting things up but it is fun seeing the earnings roll in. Without further delay we are going to look at the advertising programs you can use to earn
money from your site:
Contextual Advertising
For contextual advertising, you have 3 main options. These are Google Adsense, Adbrite and Yahoo Ads. There are other contextual advertising programs but there’s the most used so well stick with these. These are the text and link type ads that you are likely to see on the homepage of pretty much any proxy with Google Adsense
being the most popular choice because of the good payouts.
Sell text Links
For this I recommend none other than TLA (Text Link Ads). Basically if you are marketing your proxy and working on building up your backlinks then it's likely your going to generate some PR (Google PageRank). If so people will be interested in buying links on your website so that they ‘pass value’ to their website so it's
definitely something you should consider looking into if your site has PageRank.
Popups
I personally don’t like these as they have proven to drive traffic away from proxies when introduced due to the fact that people can use a proxy without them and not
be disturbed. That being said just make sure you only do this on a test site as not to annoy the visitors on a popular proxy just to try it out. Basically when someone uses your proxy they’ll get a popup on the page earning you money.
Affiliates
Ive never tried using affiliate programs on a proxy as I don’t think the result will be very effective but by all means look into it if you are getting into the proxy business which I can safely assume you are if you are reading this. Programs that pay for Zip codes and Email Address’ from the likes of AzoogleAds and Share-a-Sale may be effective here.
Ad Placement
This is my personal ad placement recommendation:


This is working well for me and has been used for a long time (similar) in the proxy industry but by all means change things up a bit if you are finding good results. I’ve also seen good results when adding contextual adverts between the search bar and
the search / go button.
If you are using Google Adsense on your site, it's important to know that you can’t put Adsense on proxified pages. You can for some other contextual advertising networks but be sure to check with them first before going ahead and doing it and risking your account with them. If you are going to be using popups or popunders I recommend only using them when someone actually uses your proxy (i.e. on
proxified pages) and not on your homepage as it may put people off actually using the proxy altogether.
Also remember that for Google Adsense and other networks you need to have
content on your page, as it's mentioned in their Terms Of Service so don’t skimp on this one, it's not worth getting banned from a network over.
Resources
As this article grows over time and gets bigger, the resources section is likely to get bigger too but we will check all links too make sure they are not outdated. Thanks
for reading Proxy 2.0, I hope you enjoyed it.
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