Who else wants to make money with proxies?

December 23, 2007 by Collin LaHay
Filed under: General 

As most of you already know, I have only been blogging for a little over a month but I have been developing websites and making money online for over a year. The first website I had ever developed was a web proxy. A web proxy allows you to bypass network firewalls and is commonly used to access websites that are normally restricted (like getting on myspace at school). I had a few ups and downs with my first proxy, but over the course of a few failures I learned a lot about how to build and market them effectively. My second attempt at making a web proxy was when I grabbed the keyword domain “unblock.cc” for a bargain at $30. Unblock Myspace was the most trafficked web proxy keyword at that time so I figured I would build a long term proxy for it. Things did not go entirely as planned, but in the course of two months I made $975.43 and then sold the website for $1300 (minus Escrow fees).

Escrow check

At that time, $2275 in two months was more than I would make in 4 months at my part time job. The moment that check arrived I knew how I wanted to make a living. Now for the good stuff!

Requirements for starting a web proxy:

  • A dedicated server or a VPS.
  • Lots of bandwidth.
  • A decent amount of ram.
  • At least 15 hours of devoted time.

Now obviously you can pick a choose a lot of these, but these are my recommendations to make money online using web proxies.

Benefits of starting a web proxy:

  • Very easy to setup.
  • Lots of money potential.
  • There isn’t any over saturation.

The market cannot be over saturated because old proxies get blocked by network filters and the users that are utilizing web proxies need to constantly find new proxies that are not yet blocked. The entire programming is open source and free to download, and include free proxy themes.

Proxy Setup:

  • Purchasing a domain name and have hosting ready.
  • Choose a proxy script. Zelune is recommended, otherwise PHProxy or CGIProxy.
  • Download the script (free proxy themes included with zelune).
  • Change the configuration/setup.
  • Upload files to your hosting.
  • Test run it to ensure there are no errors.

Proxy Promotion:

  • Complete the Proxy Checklist
  • Either buy a LOT of domains and repeat the process, or else use one powerful proxy and search engine optimize it. I personally only ran one big proxy at a time, but I know of a lot of people who made money running large networks of small/medium sized ones.

Proxy Monetization:

  • Setup adsense (two big squares get the most clicks).
  • Join Adversal (aff) and add the code to the proxified pages.
  • Sell text links and banners (after you have stats to show).
  • Sell your proxy for 2-5x monthly revenue.
  • Try affiliate sales. I have never tried doing affiliate sales, but I would assume you could sell ringtones and music downloads to the 12-20 demographic that uses proxies daily.

Proxy Pointers:

  • Do NOT use “proxy” in the domain name.
  • Advertise early or not at all.

Proxies are only useful until they get blocked from the filters. By having “proxy” in the domain name, you are instantly getting yourself blocked by 40% of the filters meaning you lose over 40% of your traffic. Even random555.info can be better than proxy123.com. If you are going to purchase advertising, I recommend getting on email newsletters for people that are looking for new proxies as they have word of mouth marketing. You want to spend your advertising dollars early before your site gets blocked by the majority of the filters.

Most importantly, making money from proxies is not as easy as it was a year ago, but there is still some money to be made for those that are looking for easy websites to build with a low starting budget. The thing you have to worry about most is getting low quality clicks (usually from Chinese visitors) and Google starts paying you less. If you get to a worse case scenario, you can always block China from accessing your websites. Best of luck with your proxies!

Comments

15 Comments on Who else wants to make money with proxies?

  1. turtie on Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 12:17 am

    2. Fascinating post! I don’t think i will go this route, but it’s interesting to hear about these types of crazy ideas. Keep up the good work!

  2. Igre on Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 1:56 am

    3. Yes, I agree, really fascinating post, this unblock.cc is sooo good, I already wanted to set up proxy and buy a domain … after new year i have to try :D .

    Am, do you recommend any good VPS ? Thx

  3. Sudarshan on Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 3:31 am

    4. Very good post…Great work…I really appreciate the way you make a post…good work..Share with us the ways of getting traffic for proxies

  4. Binh Nguyen on Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 6:25 am

    5. Thanks for the great tips for making web proxy.

    About that Chinese thing you mentioned. I wonder where else on the world would use the web-proxy. China is blocked the most compare then other Asian countries, and that’s why they use it.

    Low quality clicks? No that’s not low quality clicks but less-paying clicks. But that’s better than many other countries where Google AdSense even not available.

    I’m very glad you started using bold text now, it really help me much more than before.

  5. Collin LaHay on Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 12:38 pm

    6. It looks like the new owner left it on autopilot, because it doesn’t even rank on the first page of google anymore.

    As for a VPS, I use to use my own dedicated but I am sure you can ask around on different forums and they will give you good VPS deals.

  6. Collin LaHay on Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 12:48 pm

    7. Low quality and less paying are sort of the same thing. If enough of your clicks are not converting and of are low quality, Google may smartprice your Adsense account.

  7. Nadim on Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 3:21 pm

    8. Good post.. keep sharing your experience to help other’s gain some knowledge who are planning to move up in proxy websites

  8. Smith on Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 3:45 pm

    9. didnt you sell it a little cheap? thats like 3 months revenue.

  9. Collin LaHay on Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 3:47 pm

    10. Proxies are harder to sell than standard websites because they are so easy to reproduce and because after they get blocked (usually 3 months) they lose the majority of their traffic. Three months is standard for most proxy websites in my opinion.

  10. Smith on Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 4:55 pm

    11. yeh fair enough. good sale then.

  11. tommy on Mon, 24th Dec 2007 3:32 am

    12. Is there any chance that adsense will start to pay less on proxy sites?

  12. Collin LaHay on Mon, 24th Dec 2007 9:52 am

    13. Yeah, if you have hundreds of daily clicks and all of them are on low paying advertisements, you can expect to start earning very little for those clicks. You can possibly do what one person did and make the domain contain unrelated keywords (Mesothelioma-Proxy.com) in which it would display cancer related (higher paying) ads, but I have not tried this method.

  13. Jordan Pearce on Mon, 24th Dec 2007 11:00 am

    14. I’m not going to run out and start a proxy site but thank you for the great info. It’s going to help somewhere down the line I’m sure.

  14. eyu on Wed, 25th Jun 2008 9:35 am

    15. very nice bro..

  15. Harsh Agrawal on Wed, 23rd Sep 2009 7:04 pm

    16. Landed here from Digital point forum and must say very easy to follow steps.. I’m going to create my first proxy :)

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