There are many experienced webmasters, internet entrepreneurs and beginners to making money online etc that are running proxy websites around the world. Most likely, you got interested in the web proxy after browsing some internet forums and saw a lot of proxies related threads. If you are wondering why there are many proxies being sold and bought on the many internet marketing forums around, there are two push-pull factors involved. Firstly, for an experienced proxy webmaster, it is very easy to create a new proxy, get a free web template design, a open source web proxy script and a $10 .com domain or even a $0.99 .info domain when the offers comes around (very frequently if you are interested). All these can be done in a matter of an hour if you are fast enough. Next comes the conventional, tried and tested method of promoting the new proxy. Submit to all the proxy link exchanges you can find. These are either proxy top sites showing how many incoming and outgoing visitors or the proxy listings that rank new, freshly created proxy websites on their index page. This type of promotion is boring, but free. Yes it takes up a lot of time, but it can be automated. Most experienced proxy webmasters must have developed or purchased some auto-submission scripts to help them submit new proxies to the hundreds of top sites and proxy lists out there.
You can also try promoting your proxy at yahoo groups, msn groups and google groups etc. There are many groups with members wanting new proxy url in their mailbox. Some of these groups have thousands of members, and sound very enticing. However, the situation is not that candy laced as you thought. These mailing groups can be classified into open groups, closed groups and moderated groups. In open groups, any member can post new messages and these will be immediately emailed to the entire group. Do you get it? Yes, they are spammed like mad and you can try signing up such groups with an unwanted email account, which will probably be completely filled up within a month. I tested once and I get around 5,000 spam emails in my account. Some spammers use an automated script to blast an email every few seconds containing links to their websites. Some of these emails contain real web proxies, but most are trying me to buy some medicine and pumps to make some parts of my body longer or stronger. Closed groups act like announcement groups where only the group owner or designated moderators are allowed to post messages to the rest of the group. You may think that such groups are protected from spam and the mailing volume is lower. Not true, as yahoo groups and google groups etc have pretty low protection schemes. The email accounts of group owners and moderators are publicly available, so spammers can simply spoof their email addresses for the spam emails they send out. The results are most group members end up frustrated and end up all the emails goes to their spam folder. Finally, there is the moderated proxy mailing groups. Usually, the group owner will send and approve one email per day and this email contains links to his or her proxies. The other spoofed emails sent by spammers are caught by the email filter and the group owner will manually delete them such that they never make their way into the members' mailboxes. The proxy group owner may email members new proxies or simply recycling old ones. That is up to the decision of the owner. If you want to promote a new proxy but you do not own an established moderated mailing group, you will be wasting time trying to compete with the spammers in the open groups. You will be involved in email spoofing if you want to infiltrate the closed groups. Anyway, you will still be facing the spammer competition there. The remaining way to profit from mailing groups is to slowly build up your own. Generally it takes about 3 months to get a new proxy mailing group to about 1000 members. It takes no efforts on the part of an experienced webmaster to promote a new proxy in his or her established proxy mailing group. Scripts are available to extract new proxy urls from a database and email to proxy members every day at a specified time.
Some webmasters even suggest promoting their new and established proxy websites at forums and Yahoo Answers. From the traffic standpoint, such methods are too tedious and time consuming. Such community sites require active human participation in order to reap its benefits. The expected incoming traffic from such avenues is much lower compared to proxy listings and email newsletters above. There is one advantage to proxy promotion at forums and Yahoo Answers. That is the so called search engine optimization (SEO) benefits. Briefly speaking, when you have many links pointing to your proxy from big and well known forums, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, etc, your proxy website can be easily found or even ranked at the top of the search engine results when people type in and search for "proxy". It is a very difficult and probably low yield task to try and rank well for the keyword "proxy" for most proxy webmaster. You have some monster competitions that have hundreds of thousands of existing links pointing back. They are the proxy listing sites, just do a google search and you can see them there. You can try for years and never overtake them. Thus, most proxy webmasters do not bother with SEO tasks which take up a lot of time and effort.
At this point, you will realize the steps of proxy creation and promotions I have talked about are very simple and quickly completed. The best part is they can be easily automated. And they are free as well. The next step of promoting new proxies is simply to buy banner advertisements and featured links at popular proxy listing sites and to pay for email blasts from owners of large proxy mailing lists mentioned above. There are hundreds of proxies listing and top sites out there, all trying to earning advertising revenue from proxy owners. They have varying charges ranging from $250 to $1 a month and claim different levels of potential traffic. So which should you choose? Most beginner proxy owners try to buy the cheaper ones in fear of disappointment and limiting your exposure to risk. Actually, that is definitely the wrong way to select potential listing sites to advertise at.
One good way to calculate whether the proxy advertisement is worth it or not is simply to try out for a month or a week if it is possible. The predicted traffic volume is a very inaccurate gauge of eventual profits for you. Firstly, those traffic may not be consistent, and usually they are over optimistic and over estimated by the proxy listing owners. Next, not all traffic is equally profitable. I will not delve too deeply here, but just take note that 1,000 real US and Canadian website visitors are worth several times more than 10,000 Asian visitors and still worth much much more compared to 1,000,000 fake visitors from anywhere in the world. Yes, there are some unscrupulous proxy listing owners that inflate the visitor count by using automated surf bot programs. You simply cannot tell by the traffic volume, so just ask for a short trial period from the owners.
Some webmasters choose by observing the candidate sites for several weeks ad checking to see if the available advertisement slots are always sold out. Just be careful that some competing advertisers may actually the owner of the listing site in disguise in order to create an illusion that proxy advertising at the site is very popular and worth the money. If you see some slots always being taken by different proxies and never repeating, that usually means their owners are unable to make profitable money by advertising there. Maybe the traffic gained is worthless, or the proxy webmaster in incompetent in monetizing those traffic. Sometimes you have to keep testing and when you finally find
Finally, do not make the mistake of choosing whether to advertise your proxy at site A or site B. If both are profitable, advertise at both! After you have sourced out good proxy listing sites for paid proxy advertising, you have another source of traffic to make money from besides the above mentioned free traffic sources. This testing and sourcing for good paid sites takes time, but once you find them, what is stopping you from creating another proxy and buying more advertisement slots? From this point on, it is just simply replicate, repeat and multiply.
So if the money comes easy, where the heck do these experienced webmasters want to sell their proxies? Firstly, the monthly income from proxies is pretty low. For every 1000 visitors on my proxy website, I get around $5. This can be very variable, depending on your website template and traffic source. In one month, I get only $50 from one proxy. If I needed more money to fund another project, I sell off that proxy. Notice I said "in one month" above and not "every month". Proxy income usually trails off after the first month, despite your efforts in trying to promote it. By creating, promoting and selling the proxy after one month, I can grab the cash worth it is hot and try to sell at say $200 for a proxy. The deal price is usually 3 to 5 times of the monthly earnings. If I try to sell after two months, maybe I can only get $100 because of the ugly decrease in earnings which lowered the buyers confidence.
Why do newcomers want to try out in the proxy business? Well, firstly running a proxy website requires very little capital, around $5 for the first month and a lot of time is more than enough - $0.99 for an .info domain and the remaining $4 for one month of shared proxy hosting. Many students trying to earn a part time income are thus attracted to running proxies. Next, you do not need
Finally, many people are tempted by the so-called passive income promises. Proxy websites are claimed to be setup and forget type of websites. There is no need to keep blogging like mad in order to add fresh content. Proxy website visitors are not here for your content. They just want to use your proxy script to access other websites. When they see an interesting advertisement tagline or banner on your proxy website, they may click on it and you earn a few cents to a dollars (frankly dollars per click are quite rare though). However, there are many reasons why people stop coming back to use your proxy and you have to work hard and get new visitors or get back your old not so loyal visitors. Some will argue that you can use paid advertisement to promote and get visitors to your proxy. Yeah, let spend money and let it earn more for you right? Proxies do get blocked by web filters so if your clients are denied access to your proxy, your paid advertisements are not going to work. This is especially true for the country-level internet censorships. For example, one Iranian found your advertised proxy at listing site A and uses it happily. the next day, their internet Censorship agency catches on to your proxy url and blacklists it. Thereafter, all Iranians that visit listing site A tries to click on your proxy but cannot access it. Bye bye Iranians forever as far as that proxy of yours is concerned.
All in all, I am trying to tell new webmasters not to buy proxy from other people. They are not worth 10% of the asking price anyway. If you think you can jumpstart on the business by buying and not building from scratch, you will be missing the foundations required to become a successful proxy webmaster. You will not know how to create and put together a working proxy from the various components such as proxy script, web template, proxy hosting nuances etc. You will not know how to correctly promote your proxies because I can guarantee the seller will not tell you where to really buy paid advertisements that works nor where to get free traffic either. Maybe some common knowledge such as "oh you must submit to every proxy top site you see, just google search for them..very easy". I almost forgot another reason not to buy - proxy listing sites are only good for the initial traffic burst. When you submit your proxy url to a proxy listing site, it will be recorded into their system and your link will be shown at the top of the listing page. During this time, a lot of visitors to that listing will click on your link and then be redirected to your site. Good and yummy. However, there are other proxy owners coming in with their proxies and soon your proxy url will be pushed all the way down and onto the second, third, etc pages. When that happens, usually you get zero traffic thereafter. You are usually not allowed to resubmit that proxy url to the same proxy top list, in the hop that you will be put on the top of the list again. Fat hope, they recognize that you have already submitted so they reject it this time. When you buy over that proxy that has already been submitted, its previous owner has already reaped the free traffic rewards, leaving you the current owner with nothing. Do not blame the proxy listing owners, they work on the premise of providing new unblocked internet proxies for their visitors and as such, they only want new and fresh proxies that has not yet been seen and detected by web content filters. A resubmitted proxy cannot be that new and fresh right?
