Optimize Your Web Proxy Business

Starting a web proxy is easy, a proxy webmasters doesn’t need to know html or any other technical stuff to succeed with the proxy business. There are a lot of proxy sites or networks for sale everyday, the reasons for each single sale are very different: the proxy consumes too much bandwidth or server resources or the proxy doesn’t create the earnings as planned. The last one is what this article is about, some guide to have more success.

Create proxies for people not (only) for your earnings

Remember yourself why the proxy business is still successful, because people like surf blocked websites at school or work. Providing a proxy service that is not fast or has more ads than each TV break are not very useful for this target group. Sure you need ads because you need pay your server, advertising and of course you need some profit too, but do it the right way. Just ask yourself, “Would you use this proxy service?” Use CPC ads (Adsense) on your proxy portal page and CPM banner ads on proxified pages.

Web server and bandwidth

While its possible to get a lot of shared hosting for only a few bucks you need some real server for your proxy business. A dedicated server is what you need, how this server

need to be depends on how much proxies want to host. There are two important proxy scripts: PHProxy and CGIproxy. While CGIproxy is able to offer much more features to proxy users need the script much more resources than PHProxy. Start with the PHProxy script, a smaller server (Pentium D with 2GB of memory) can handle 10 proxies using this script. Note this advice is based on my experience and depends on how you optimize your server, find some advice here. The maintenance of a Linux web server is not easy for a non Linux Guru, try to get some managed server.

Your nice looking web proxy site

Sure since you proxy is just a portal you don’t need a unique web design and more a proxy template that is optimized for maximum earnings (CPC clicks). For the start get some readymade free PHProxy template and place your Adsense code above the URL form. Check other proxies and learn from them, most have similar schemes. Add also some text about proxies to your site to get related ads and maybe some traffic via search engines like Google. Remember the advice from above:
Provide proxies for people!

Promote your proxy to get enough visitors

Without user your proxy is worthless. You need to promote your proxies on places where people come because they are looking for proxies or related stuff. That can be proxy directories, Proxy top lists (or other lists) or any other place where you can place a link (MySpace profiles, forum signatures or regular websites). If you have some budget for advertising you should try the top listing slot from popular proxy lists or advertise your proxy on some proxy mailing list. Using CPC advertisements is a lot to expensive; don’t spend more than a few cents for one click.

Promoting your site on proxy top sites

You have seen them on a lot of proxy sites: lots of buttons from proxy top sites. There are also top site submission services; you get 100 subscriptions done for just a few dollars. Don’t use them; this kind of promotion doesn’t work. A lot of those proxies list the proxy with the most button impressions at the top and this is what you don’t need, ask yourself:

"Why should some visitor browse the top site until he found my listing?"

Use only those top lists which show the top referrer on the no. 1 listing. Check the stats from the top 5 for the outbound clicks, if there are only a few of them this top site doesn’t have enough visitors.

Some final hints for your proxy business

• Limit the file access, each large file downloads will eat some of your bandwidth and server resources (you need internet surfer and not downloader)
• Your target group are the kids at school or people at work, this group want to visit sites like MySpace or friendster. So your users are less likely to be surfing for inappropriate videos.
• For the maximum of revenue you need traffic from countries like the US, UK or CA. All other countries are not bad but what if some users in other countries will eat all your resources while people in the US getting a poor speed using your proxy.
• Don’t forget to monitor your proxies, check earnings and other statistics (referrer traffic) frequently, any outgoing click to some website that has no (more) value for your proxy is a worthless click for your business.