Building|Managing|Promoting|Monetizing

Hopefully you now have your proxy set up and have found a web hosting provider. The following steps are tips on how you can manage your proxy in a professional manner.

1) Maintenance.. nope, no tools required.

Unlike a normal informative website there is not much maintenance to be carried out. This is because you are offering a free service with not a lot, to zero content on your actual website. However, you may want to occasionally browse through your proxy and look around your homepage at any links you may have to find broken links. Contact the person who owns this link on your site to tell them that their broken/dead links are being removed. To interact with other Proxy Users and Owners of how they maintain their websites you can visit the ProxyHost.com Forums.

2) 'Typical', oh no!

Nowadays when people think of proxies, it’s the web 2.0 glossy look with a simple search bar and unflattering AdSense spots alongside frequent popups. Keep the design simple and efficient. Blend the AdSense ad’s in well so there is more chance of a click on the ad. Make the colour of the background the same colour as your search text and the colour of your AdSense title. AdSense methods and information will be explained later.
It is very important for your site to be efficient to the end user. Ensure the search bar is simple text – an easy to read font, with a clear colour scheme.

Popups are hated by users so when building your proxy and the initial stages of promotion (explained later), I would advise you not to add popup ads. Another thing with typical proxy sites is that they have large images at the bottom – lots of them! These are reciprocal link images from Top Sites and are meant to drive traffic to your websites. The truth of the matter is that it looks to the user like spam, and is an unwanted feature to an end-user – this can lose you many visitors.

3) Top Sites? I'm one of those

Carrying from the above paragraph, Top Sites do have their advantages and disadvantages. Top Sites are proven to drive a certain amount of traffic to your websites and a backlink will be created on their website to help with search engine traffic.

However, some Top Sites are known to drive bot traffic to your website. This means artificial traffic, normally from a singular IP address. This could seriously damage your profits if you have AdSense implemented within your proxy due to the Google AdSense staff being very strict and cautious of Artificial traffic to websites, so the website owners’ AdSense account could be in serious jeopardy. Another disadvantage is that it looks unflattering at the bottom of your web page. This is due to the majority of Top Sites wanting a reciprocal link back, normally in the form of an image.

If you are going to use a Top Site, make sure that it is well-presented; and ensure that you are guaranteed by the website that you will not receive any such traffic. If you do not do this your proxy may not survive.

4) Ethics - have you been naughty of nice?

Being ethical means “conforming to accepted standards of social or professional behavior”. A couple of ways in which you can be ethical in what you do, is to always remain in a professional environment when it comes to developing proxies. I strongly suggest you don’t add your proxy URL in forum signatures. One reason is that you may get click bombed (multiple clicking on your ads) by potential competitors or people doing this through jealousy. A word of advice is to never click bomb a potential competitor of yourself. This is the perfect example of being unethical. Another way to be ethical in what you do is not to brag about profits. Publicize your profits where needs be, an example where this may be needed is if you are selling your proxy websites for a multiple of profits, where profit levels should be mentioned. Other than this it would be very inappropriate to do so.

5) Linking,- got friends?

Linking means exchanging links between yourself and similar websites. An example would be adding your link to ProxyHost.com. This would create a backlink and there is more of a change of your website being indexed in the major search engines. Wherever possible exchange links with proxy websites whom have traffic and a PageRank would be a bonus. This would increase your traffic levels through search engines due to the PageRank. Try keeping your website clean and if multiple links are added, create its own section so the website does not look like it contains spam. This would drive a website visitor away and move to a competitor. You may also want to submit your URL to website directories. This would also raise PageRank dependant upon the directories PageRank. Directories will be explained in full, at a later stage.

6) Financing; cash, dosh, moola – you know what I'm talking about.

When creating a proxy you may find that finance may be an issue. The costs would typically involve $8 a year for a domain name and if you can’t find shared hosting - $130 for a dedicated server per month. To find the cheapest hosting for your proxy website, we here at ProxyHost.com do have a list of companies allowing proxies on their servers.

Start up costs will be high due to the domain name and hosting however there are ways in which you can reduce this. One being the domain name extension. Dot com (.COM) domain names usually vary from $6.99 to $35 so shopping around is crucial. Next you will need to sort out hosting. If you can’t find a suitable company for your website, I would strongly recommend you start off with a vps until you have enough to purchase a dedicated server. How to monetize your proxy will be explained at a later stage. Once you have accumulated enough revenue, you can then move to dedicated server hosting. Typically these will be your only costs unless you choose to pay for traffic – explained at a later stage.

Hopefully these 6 steps have helped you and you will now be able to manage your proxy in an ethical, revenue making fashion!