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As most of you already know, I have only been blogging for a little over a month but I have been developing websites and making money online for over a year. The first website I had ever developed was a web proxy. A web proxy allows you to bypass network firewalls and is commonly used to access websites that are normally restricted (like getting on myspace at school). I had a few ups and downs with my first proxy, but over the course of a few failures I learned a lot about how to build and market them effectively. My second attempt at making a web proxy was when I grabbed the keyword domain “unblock.cc” for a bargain at $30. Unblock Myspace was the most trafficked web proxy keyword at that time so I figured I would build a long term proxy for it. Things did not go entirely as planned, but in the course of two months I made $975.43 and then sold the website for $1300 (minus Escrow fees).

At that time, $2275 in two months was more than I would make in 4 months at my part time job. The moment that check arrived I knew how I wanted to make a living. Now for the good stuff!

Requirements for starting a web proxy:

• A dedicated server or a VPS.
• Lots of bandwidth.
• A decent amount of ram.
• At least 15 hours of devoted time.

Now obviously you can pick a choose a lot of these, but these are my recommendations to make money online using web proxies.

Benefits of starting a web proxy:

• Very easy to setup.
• Lots of money potential.
• There isn’t any over saturation.

The market cannot be over saturated because old proxies get blocked by network filters and the users that are utilizing web proxies need to constantly find new proxies that are not yet blocked. The entire programming is open source and free to download, and include free proxy themes.

Proxy Setup:

• Purchasing a domain name and have hosting ready.
• Choose a proxy script. Zelune is recommended, otherwise PHProxy or CGIProxy.
• Download the script (free proxy themes included with zelune).
• Change the configuration/setup.
• Upload files to your hosting.
• Test run it to ensure there are no errors.

Proxy Promotion:

• Complete the Proxy Checklist
• Either buy a LOT of domains and repeat the process, or else use one powerful proxy and search engine optimize it. I personally only ran one big proxy at a time, but I know of a lot of people who made money running large networks of small/medium sized ones.

Proxy Monetization:

• Setup adsense (two big squares get the most clicks).
• Join Adversal (aff) and add the code to the proxified pages.
• Sell text links and banners (after you have stats to show).
• Sell your proxy for 2-5x monthly revenue.
• Try affiliate sales. I have never tried doing affiliate sales, but I would assume you could sell ringtones and music downloads to the 12-20 demographic that uses proxies daily.

Proxy Pointers:

• Do NOT use “proxy” in the domain name.
• Advertise early or not at all.

Proxies are only useful until they get blocked from the filters. By having “proxy” in the domain name, you are instantly getting yourself blocked by 40% of the filters meaning you lose over 40% of your traffic. Even random555.info can be better than proxy123.com. If you are going to purchase advertising, I recommend getting on email newsletters for people that are looking for new proxies as they have word of mouth marketing. You want to spend your advertising dollars early before your site gets blocked by the majority of the filters.

Most importantly, making money from proxies is not as easy as it was a year ago, but there is still some money to be made for those that are looking for easy websites to build with a low starting budget. The thing you have to worry about most is getting low quality clicks (usually from Chinese visitors) and Google starts paying you less. If you get to a worse case scenario, you can always block China from accessing your websites. Best of luck with your proxies!