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Building web based proxy sites!

Yup, that’s what I am in to now. Lately I’ve been building and promoting web based proxy sites. When I recently went through a web spaz and decided to update and reformat a lot of my sites I also decided to try and find a use for some domains I had registered but weren’t in use.

After spending a bunch of time surfing around the forums on digitalpoint.com and hearing a bunch of people talking about web proxies, I decided that is what I would use my spare domains for. Some of the folks around digitalpoint.com said that the proxy market was over populated and that it was hard to make money there now. I must say I thought they were wrong so I continued on.

My first proxy (squibber.net) was built with a script called Phproxy. After I had finally got it up and running I realized that the author had given up on the development of it. I figured there wasn’t much use in using a script that wasn’t supported anymore so I went in search of a new one. I stumbled upon some other scripts such as CGI-Proxy, Zelune and Glype. I finally settled on Glype because this script was still under development and had an active community. It was also very easy to install, configure and style (there’s lots of free templates around).

All that was just the first part of what I needed to do to start making money. I then had to find the right PPC networks to run. Adsense is good but I came to find out that their TOS does not allow the use of their ads on proxified pages (the pages viewed after loaded in via the proxy) so I had to find another one. This was to hard because lots of people said that Adbrite was decent for this so I decided, since I was already signed up with Adbrite, to use them on these “proxified” pages.

Now that I had my ads all sorted out I needed to find a way to get people to visit my sites. Since proxy sites aren’t made of content (like a blog would be), it’s not much sense to try and get Google to index it and move up the PageRank scale like one would traditionally do (although it will evently help). I found that there are tons of proxy top sites out there so I went on a mad spree submitting my sites. To my surprise this worked quite well and I went from 0 to ~140 unique views almost overnight.

Since I had pretty much cluttered my pages with reciprocal links I thought it might be time to find another way to promote my sites without having to reciprocate each and every link. That is when I found Web Proxy Talk (a forum based on all things proxy). What a good find this site was. I was able to get answers from a community dedicated to the new niche I was exploring. It’s still a fairly low traffic site but the folks there have been more than helpful and I’ve been able to exchange links, find more top sites, and learn about MySpace bulletins and news groups.

So I bet you are now asking “Are you making any money?”. Well, honestly, not much yet. Come on now, I just started so give it time. One thing I have learned over the years is that making money on the web is not the “get rich quick scheme” that most people think it is. It takes lots of time and effort to get good at it and start bringing in the money (of course that’s what I’m guessing because I’m not there yet).

If you want to start looking into the proxy site business here are some links that will help you out:

Web Proxy Talk
Proxy friendly web hosting from TechEntrance
Domain name registration
Pay Per Click Ads: Adsense & Adbrite

Cheers!
~TheNerd

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