Building|Managing|Promoting|Monetizing

This following guide will lead you through the steps needed to promote your proxy well and how to gain a lot of traffic from type-ins, search engines and link traffic.

It is split up into paid and non-paid methods of gaining traffic.

Paid (Money Required)

These following methods are methods of gaining traffic by spending money.

1) AdWords

If you choose to add Google AdSense on your website, you are the publisher – you are publishing the ads and are getting paid per click on the ad.

Google AdWords is where customers can sign up for the service and actually construct their ad’s which will be visible on other people’s websites. You pay dependant upon the current minimum price per click which is dependant upon the actual keyword. If you wish to advertise your proxy using AdWords, you are in luck. This is due to proxy pay per click price being substantially low, compared to other keywords. For example for the word ‘proxy’ you may need to pay $0.05 for each person who clicks on your advertisement. This is compared to maybe $1.20 per click for the keyword ‘law’.
An advantage of Google AdWords is that you can Geo-Target your customers. This means you can target your ads to be displayed in a certain area. For example the UK and/or USA. AdWords will increase traffic thus revenue.

You can sign up for AdWords at adwords.google.com.

2) Text-Link-Ads.com

Text Link Ads (TLA) is a marketplace, at which you can either buy or sell text link ad’s. We will concentrate on the purchasing of text link ads. Once you have purchased an ad, your anchor text and URL will be placed on the chosen website.

TLA will help you increase your PageRank, thus increasing traffic. PageRank, as mentioned before, will rank you higher in search engines for a particular word or phrase.
Firstly, you will need to create an account. Once this is done, log into the account and search for websites which are similar to your own. Alexa rank can determine the amount of traffic the website it is getting to the lower the number the better it is for your website. You will get link traffic from this website. Link popularity on TLA means the PageRank. I would suggest you choose websites with PR 4 or higher. To enhance traffic, you would want a link on a ‘sitewide’ spot but to increase rankings you only need 1 link. This means your link is on every page on that website. This can be found under “pages your link will be on”. Anything over 1 is good enough – the higher the better. You can save $100 by using this link. I would recommend purchasing around 4-6 links first to see how this will effect your website.
TLA is very effective and is proven to raise a websites PageRank.

3) Premium Backlinks.

As mentioned before, a backlink is a website with your URL and anchor text on it. A directory is a public database of many links related to different topics. directories will be explained later. Well established directories charge for a link in their database. An example of one of these is the Aviva directory. Submitting to this kind of a directory could increase PageRank greatly. A premium backlink would be a premium spot at the top of the directory category. These kind of spots are sought after and are costly however the benefits may outweigh the costs. The premium spot on the homepage would increase traffic to your website, thus revenue.

4) SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Traffic from search engines is priceless and if you manage to get many pages indexed in Google, Yahoo and MSN, you should expect great amounts of traffic. SEO will optimize your page to get indexed in search engines quicker and for more keywords. Methods such as adding ‘H1’ tags on your page or keyword density are typical simple methods of optimizing your page – however SEO can be, and is more complex than this. Paying for a search engine optimizer can be costly, especially when hiring a company to do this. seocompany.ca and Digitalpoint.com offer SEO services. Again, the benefits could outweigh the costs when it comes to paying for SEO. Gaining organic traffic could be the key to any business and in the case; a proxy.

If you do not wish to pay an external company to do the SEO on your website then you can follow guides and books to do effectively the same things yourselves; you should not however expect the same results as if a professional had done this.

Always avoid BlackHat SEO companies. These companies use methods which are frowned upon by search engines, and if you are caught using these services you may be banned from the search engines themselves – this is the last thing that you could possibly want to happen to your proxy.

The above 4 methods of ultimately paying for traffic are very effective if used right. Here are some excellent methods of increasing traffic to your website and not needing to spend a penny!

Non-Paid (No Money Required)

1) Articles

Writing articles can be very beneficial. Article directories are just like normal website directories however they contain articles on different subjects. Some of the major websites in this sector are ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. These websites both have a high traffic volume and ezinearticles have an outstanding PageRank. An example of an article on ezine articles:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Proxy-Hosting---Finding-the-Best-Web-Host-for-Proxies&id=643067

Submitting your article to directories would help with both increasing traffic and increasing PageRank. Due to the high PR of many established article directories, you will most definitely get ranked in Google for that article.

I would recommend writing a 300-550 word article about anonymous surfing, with a link back to your website at the bottom of the article (there is normally a “about me” section which allows HTML code).

2) Social Bookmarking

In technical terms, social Bookmarking is

‘An activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others.’

The main three social Bookmarking services/companies would be Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg. You can view websites which other people post up. Let’s use StumbleUpon.com (henceforth known as SU) as an example. You download the SU toolbar and you can browse websites related to your chosen category. You then browse that category by clicking ‘Stumble’ (which is equivalent to “Next”) and each time it will lead you to a different category-related website. You can also add your proxy website to these categories. I would suggest “internet tools” as a category.

When someone subscribes or browses the internet services category, your website will appear to that user sometime in their browse session.

3) Link Exchanges

This area is a simple yet effective way to raise PageRank and gain traffic. A lot of this section is mentioned in the “managing your proxy” area. To participate in a link exchange, you place the partners URL on your website and they’ll do the same to yours.

This is most effective when you swap with a website theme similar to yours. Try looking for websites with a high PageRank and are willing to trade links with your proxy website. Remember to keep an area just for links so your page looks tidy and professional.

4) Forums

Using your URL in forums does have its advantages and its share of disadvantages. Placing your URL and anchor text in a forum signature would help your website get indexed in search engines and help you get traffic. This is because after every post you make, someone may read it and click on the link in your signature. If you do this it’s essential to be a regular poster to make it beneficial. General webmaster forums or proxy themed websites such as ProxyHost.com will be an excellent start.

However, forums do have their disadvantages. If you post on webmaster forums or proxy themed forums, you may be click bombed by jealous competitors. This is very frequent amongst proxy owners. You can be assured that all ProxyHost.com members remain professional and discuss all matters regarding proxies with a business minded manner.

5) Top Sites

Top sites were mentioned earlier in the ‘managing your proxy’ section. They can put your AdSense account seriously at risk if used (presuming you are using AdSense).

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, 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.

6) SEO

The basic background of SEO is mentioned above in the paid methods of gaining traffic.

Simple SEO techniques are easy to learn and can save you a ton of money. Adding H1 tags, keyword density, keywords in your domain name are just a few of the simple steps. I would strongly suggest researching SEO and implementing them into your website. With Search Engine Optimization implemented on your website you can expect some organic traffic. A couple articles here where you can learn more about SEO.

10 Simple SEO Strategies

SEO Techniques

The above techniques explain how to obtain traffic to your websites by paying and free techniques. If you do have any queries on need someone to elaborate on a technique mentioned, please feel free to post up on our proxyhost forum