Well, I have completed my first month of running some proxy sites and after having gone over the results, I am reasonably pleased with the outcome. Ok, it has been a little over a month, but a complete month has now elapsed, the results are in and I have been able to sit down and see how it all progressed.
Firstly, I started the month with a proxy that was about 5 days old, I purchased a new server to put it (and others) on as it was pushing my current server to the limits! So I had some expenses to contend with. My strategey for the month was to launch a new site over each weekend and have it ready for the new working/school week. Proxy sites get blocked fairly frequently, so I always had a strategey in mind to regularly launch a new site.
Now onto the ledger. My first expense was to purchase a heap of domain names - I went for .info domains as they are nice and cheap to register. The second and biggest expense was a server to host the proxy sites on. Next, I spent a small amount doing various promotions on each newly launched site. My final expense was to get some nice custom header graphics created.
The revenue side of things I took on a 2-pronged approach and that was to display advers on the proxy site pages, and on the actual proxied pages to have a pop-under display. This has so far worked out reasonably well, with about 50% of my income coming from each source. It is always good to have multiple income streams for your sites.
Over the month, I was easily able to make enough to cover my biggest expense of the Server. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that I was also able to cover all other expenses, including registering the domain names (which will get a full Years worth of use), all of the promotion and recover the costs of the design/headers for not only the 4 site I have online but a couple of extra ones as well Once everything was paid for it left a small profit.
Now, I have 4 proxy sites contributing to this income and only 1 is older than 1 month. The other 3 came online at various times during this month. One of the sites is only 4 days old and hardly contributed to the bottom line. As I plan to continue down the path I have already started on, I would hazard a guess that next month will be even better. I will have the current 4 proxy’s bringing in an income for a Full month, and I will deploy another 4 or 5 new sites as well, further improving my chances of an increased income.
Now a reflection on how much work was involved. I had to set up and configure a new server and I had to skin and promote each new site. The server took around 4-5 hours of effort to set up and secure and each site took around an hour to skin and about 1-2 hours to promote. Promotion includes things like submitting to topsites and directories and doing a few link exchanges.
If I take the time I spent into consideration for this month, then I was really working for very little return. I would have earned more flipping burgers. This is not to say that I won’t continue, but it is more of an observation that building and running proxy sites is not about immediate and fast profits. Just like any other web business, you need to work at it and grow it from month to month. I am guessing that after 3-4 months of doing pretty much the same as I have been till now will see a reasonable return on the time I will be putting into this whole proxy business.
Building and running a proxy network is a bit of a risk for someone who has no experience. If things had gone badly, I would have had expenses totalling a couple of hundred $$ and not be able to pay. It is a fair bet, that someone with a little bit of experience in running websites and running Servers, has $500-1000 to fall back on to cover the first 3 months expenses (in full) should be able to build a proxy network to compliment their other online income streams.
