Web Proxy Promotion Guide

I have decided to start with "Top Sites" purely because it is the most debatable method of proxy promotion with very mixed opinions on how effective it actually is.

For every person I have had tell me that top sites are rubbish, worthless and a waste of time, I have had 5 others tell me the exact opposite. Based purely on my own experience, the fact is that top sites do work, but only if you know what you are doing and conduct a little research.

Your average web proxy will have a list of top sites at the very bottom of the page, right out of sight and mind. Quite often these will be placed into silly scrolling scripts which just make it even more distracting and annoying.

Putting aside the silly scrolling scripts, placement of all the top site links at the bottom is not how you are going to get the best out of them. Take 30 seconds out and look at the top site (yes 30 seconds is all it takes), find out by what method they order the listings.

It will usually be one of the following:

In - The number of visitors which the proxy has delivered to the top site.

Pageviews - The number of times your web proxy has been viewed by a visitor from any source.

Out - The number of visitors which the top site has delivered to the proxy.

Of those three options, the most common are the first two. In fact I have only ever come across one proxy top site that used the 'Out' option and it didn't stay that way for long.

For those top sites which order using the 'Pageviews' option the best place to locate the link code is indeed at the bottom of the proxy. As it is based on your traffic your only concern with regards to ranking well on these top sites is to ensure a steady flow of traffic to your proxy.

The top sites which are using the 'In' option should have the link code placed at the top of the proxy, yes I did indeed say at the TOP! Right in front of your users where they can see and click on them.

Right now you either think I am crazy or your about to stop reading, but don't. Lets do the math by using one of these top sites as an example:

At the time of writing, the top site ProxyTop.com number one position is occupied by a proxy which has delivered a total of 14 users to the proxy today. The proxy in question is your run of the mill proxy with 50 top sites and links all placed at the bottom.

Now you come along with your web proxy and the code placed at the top of your proxy, with any decent level of traffic (which you will obtain if you implement all of my strategies) you will easily generate more than 14 per day; and a lot more to boot. You will grab that number one spot and occupy it on a daily basis.

Lets say you generate a total of 50 per day, if those 50 outbound visitors turn into 100 inbound visitors you have doubled your traffic and if you haven`t already figured out, proxies are all about traffic.

But wait, traffic is not the only benefit. Being listed in the number one spot (the homepage of the topsite) brings another added SEO benefit. You will be taking the first share of any link juice that is passed from the page and if you combine that with a good title for your proxy then you will also improve your search engine rankings which in turn will improve your traffic.

What makes a good title depends if you are targeting a specific niche. For example if your target is MySpace users and your keywords are something along the lines of:

'myspace proxy, myspace web proxy, anonymous myspace proxy'

Then picking any one of those as the title of your proxy will provide you with the best value. Otherwise stick to the name of your proxy.

Here are a few silly title's I just picked up, avoid doing this:

» browserproxy.com - Free anonymous web proxy - Unblock MySpace and YouTube - surf the Web with privacy and security / Fast and Free

» Browse the Internet at school or work with UnblockAde.com to unblock all your favorite websites like Myspace, Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Orkut, hi5 and more!

» Free Web Based PHP + cURL Proxy

» Free Web Based Proxy - Browse Your Web Site Anonymously and Securely !

They are all too long and not keyword specific. Stick to three or four words related to your keywords or the name of your proxy.

Tips:

#1. Dont overload your proxy with every single top site that you can find. The more top sites you have the more distracting it can be for your users.

#2. From the top sites that you place at the top of your proxy, place the ones which require higher pageviews to get to the number one spot on the left side and the ones which require less pageviews on the right.

#3. Remember that for every top site you add, you are also adding 1-5 seconds additional load time to your page. The greater the load time the more chance there is that the user will just leave and go elsewhere.

Proxy lists are one of the best sources of steady free traffic that you can get for your proxy. In the majority of cases all it will cost you is a back link from your proxy to the proxy list and thats it you get a free listing.

What I normally do is find 20 to 30 proxy lists which have been active for at least 3 months. I always place the links at the bottom of the proxy below everything else because the links are non-important to the proxy users and you don't particularly want your users to click them anyway.

One week later I go back to each proxy list and check to ensure they have added my proxy, if they haven't then I remove the link from my web site. One week is more than enough time for any decent admin to approve or decline a proxy submission.

Once I have removed all of the dead and inactive lists from my proxy I am usually left with around 10-15 proxy lists.

The next step takes a little bit of time but is definitely worth doing if you want your proxy to be a success. You will need to open up a spreadsheet or grab a pen and paper for this step.

Note: If proxy.org is on your list, you can remove it straight away as it will almost certainly be top for each of the following exercises.

Make a list of the proxies and then head on over to the Yahoo Site Explorer. What you are going to do first is get the back link count for each of the proxy lists.

To get the true count of back links from Yahoo you need to follow these steps...

1) Enter the full domain name, e.g. http://www.azproxies.com/

2) Click the Inlinks link.

3) Select 'Except from this domain' in the first menu.

4) Select 'Entire site' in the second menu.

The number then shown in brackets after 'Inlinks' is the number of back links for this web site. As per the image below:

Once you have your back link counts the next step is to grab the Alexa rankings for each proxy list. This is quicker if you have the toolbar installed but if not you can just head over to Alexa and enter the domain name, select the site ranking option and click go.

The last step is to check a few keywords on Google. Pick three keywords which you think a proxy list should rank well for, it is completely your own judgment which keywords you use but here are a few to get you started:

proxy list
web proxy list
http proxy list
working proxies
working web proxies
working http proxies
free anonymous proxy list
web based proxy list

Now search Google for your three chosen keywords and locate the position of each of the proxy lists and make a note of it in your spreadsheet. This is obviously much easier if you have access to some software and I would highly recommend SEO Elite for this particular task. It is expensive but once you start using it you will find it an extremely useful tool for every single web project that you run and it will repay itself many times over.

At the end you should be left with a spreadsheet which looks like this:

For my keywords I chose to use "working web proxies", "web proxy list" and "proxy list".

We can now begin the process of elimination. This is in part down to your own preference because you will have varied results depending on the keywords you decided to use, but I will explain how I do this and then you can build your own system around it.

1) Remove all proxy lists which have an Alexa rank greater than one million.

2) Remove all proxy lists which have fewer than one thousand back links.

3) Remove all proxy lists which don't rank or rank poorly for the three keywords.

4) Narrow the list down to the best three to five and remove the rest.

What I am left with is as follows:

By process of elimination I am left with three proxy lists which we know are active because they accepted our submission. We know they have good Google rankings and are getting traffic and we know they are being promoted because they have good back link counts.

These final three proxy lists are where I would invest in premium placements to ensure that my web proxy is getting good quality targeted traffic. Paying for these premium placements is a crucial step in generating your initial traffic that will ensure you jump to the top of the top sites. Take a look at the following diagram to see how the traffic will flow as your traffic increases and your positions in the top sites improve.

Now you will note that I earlier told you to remove proxy.org from your list if it was present because it would almost certainly top all of the aforementioned checks. If you have the budget available then I highly recommend that you at the very least purchase a bold listing with proxy.org as this will drive regular daily traffic to your proxy.

Tips:

#1. Dont try to get your proxy listed on every single list out there. You will find that it is impossible to manage all of the links.

#2. Always carry out proper research into any proxy list before deciding to advertise with them. At the very least you need to check the search engine rankings.

Many proxy owners don't think of forums as part of their promotion campaign. Even I overlooked it when I first began promoting my proxies but that was a mistake I shall not make again and here is why.

Forums rank very well in the search engines for long tail keywords due to the fact that for the most part it is good fresh content which we all know the search engines lap up like a puppy.

You might think that the forums are only used by other proxy owners, but you would be surprised at how many visitors per day hit these forums and end up clicking the signature links and following through to the web proxies.

Not only that but it is also a good way to steadily increase your back links to improve your search engine rankings. Granted forum links don't carry as much weight as they used to, but they still carry weight and considering the potential for clicks from long tail key searches it is definitely a good promotion method.

So how do you take advantage of forums?

Simple, just get involved. Put the links to your proxy in your signature and then forget about them (Please remember to check the individual terms for each forum as they have different rules regarding how many links you are permitted). Then all you need to do is keep conversing with the other members and make sure you are involved in any hot topics.

Within a few weeks your back links will be picked up by the search engines and your search engine rankings will improve slightly, but more importantly the threads that you were involved in will start to pick up traffic and some of that traffic will filter through to your proxy.

Groups has been a popular way to promote web proxies for some time and as such has attracted the usual level of spam which end up ruining it for everyone.

In order to get the best out of groups you should type up a short message including the URL of the proxy you are promoting in both the subject and the body.

Send that message out once, to each list, once per day or once every other day depending on your schedule and number of lists you are using.

Any more than that and you are likely to annoy people into ignoring your messages or get blocked from the list altogether.

People get mixed results from lists and it varies based on what time you send your message, what type of subscriber base is reading the messages, how many people are actually active in the group, etc.

The best thing to do is just keep plugging away as it can produce great results if you hit it at the right time and place.

Just pop along to Yahoo Groups and Google Groups and search for the term proxy, you will find several lists to choose from.

Yahoo Answers is not what it used to be in terms of promoting a web proxy. This has largely been caused by proxy owners spamming the system to death. However it is still worth doing IF you plan to do it properly.

The premise is quite simple. A user comes along and asks a question related to web proxies and you come along and answer that question whilst making sure to include a link or two.

What happens in reality is that the users asks his question and then as soon as the word 'proxy' is seen, twenty to thirty people come along and each post a list of their proxies.

If you want to spend time on this method of promotion then do it properly and actually answer the users QUESTION! This has several benefits because you are more likely to be chosen as the best answer which will in turn provide you with more exposure because your answer will be listed at the top above all of those lists of links thus giving you more weight and presence.

I generally check in once a day during the week, find one or two questions which are still open and post an answer to each. The questions are generally from people wanting to access web sites from school so it is not worth spending time on this promotion method during the weekends or during school holidays.

It is not worth wasting your time submitting your proxy to web directories. Paid or Free.

Any free directory which accepts a web proxy is unlikely to be around for very long. It will either be sold off at which point all of the listings will be pruned. It will convert into a paid directory, again at which point listings will be pruned. Or it will simply die off because the owner looses interest in it.

Any paid directory worth being listed in is not going to accept web proxies because they have a very short life span and they lack content of any kind. Web directories that are worth being listed in usually have very high editorial standards and a web proxy simply wouldn't qualify.

Neither paid or free directories will produce the kind of traffic which a web proxy needs to sustain itself. There are much better promotion methods for you to spend your time on.

Unlike web directories, bidding directories tend to have a much lower standard of editorial integrity and at the present time they are largely unused by web proxies so there is a whole new market waiting to be tapped.

A bidding directory works on the basis of displaying the listings according to the bid amount. The highest bidders are placed on the homepage of the directory with the remaining listings either categorized or displayed alphabetically.

If you want to build back links quickly to improve your position in the search engines then these are perfect. The vast majority have low starting bids ranging between $1 and $5 which for a permanent back link is a great deal.

You can find a list of bidding directories over at Bidilicious where you can browse according to various criteria such as PageRank, Starting Bid Amount, Alexa Rank, etc.

Remember to submit using your target keywords as the title for your listing to ensure you get the benefit in the search engines. This was explained in the Top Sites section at the start of this lens.

When it comes to buying links for a web proxy it is a selective process which is determined by your target audience. If you are targeting a niche such as MySpace or Bebo then this method can work very well.

However if you are just running a general proxy targeting every type of proxy user then you will find this method much harder to implement and I would actually advise you against doing it because you will largely be throwing money away.

When buying a link for your niche based proxy you need to focus only on those web sites where your audience is likely to be. A good example would be to purchase links on a MySpace Resource site to promote a MySpace proxy because these often generate thousands of visitors on a daily basis.

By far the best place to obtain links is Digital Point Link Sales forum, there are always bargains up for grabs across a variety of web sites so finding something for your niche shouldn't be too difficult.

If you are concerned about picking up a penalty from search engines by purchasing links then don't. Just ask the link seller to add in the nofollow attribute to your link as most will not have a problem in doing this.

Remember the primary reason for buying the link is to pull in the traffic not to try and manipulate your search engine rankings. Always target high traffic web sites that are within your advertising budget and of course related to your niche.

There is no magic trick to promoting a web proxy, it is basically a case of time and effort. The more you put in the more you are likely to get in return.

If you are an old hand then I am sure you have already found this out. If you are new to running a web proxy then please don't make the mistake of thinking you can put it online and sit back to watch the $$$$ roll in because you will be waiting and watching a long time!

Sit down and plan out each step of your campaign as far in advance as possible. Carry out the research that is required and prepare your budgets and targets well before you actually open your proxy site.

The objective is to hit the ground running with a high level of traffic that maintains rather than dwindles off.

Make a list of the tasks you intend to do each day and stick to it. An example of my daily task list is below.

Good luck with your Proxy Promotion and I hope you enjoyed my lens and more importantly I hope that you learnt something from it.

Daily Task List:

#1. Spend 30 minutes at Yahoo Answers.

#2. Spend an hour promoting on Yahoo / Google Groups.

#3. Obtain two new bidding directory links each day.

#4. Post at least two quality posts each day to each of the proxy forums.

#5. Try to obtain one new high traffic link from a quality related web site.

#6. Always keep my eye open for new promotion opportunities.