The primary objective of any webmaster is to make money. For proxies this means that the site must at least break even with its hosting, domain renewal and advertising costs.

Some of the appeal of proxy websites is the fact that they are easy to get online (within minutes) and the fact that they require little-to-no maintenance once uploaded. This hands-off (passive) income is extremely desirable.

While the site itself will require little attention once online it is however necessary to allocate time for tweaking and promoting the site to ensure profits are maximised. A webmaster that continually tests different ad placement, on page content and promotion strategies is far more likely to realise a sizable income than one who barely covers hosting and domain renewal fees.

The two most prominent advertisers on proxy sites are Adversal and Google’s AdSense program. Both of these programs are discussed in depth on subsequent pages in this series, but the key metric to monitor and improve is click-through rate (CTR). This figure tells you the percentage of people that clicked on ads compared to those who did not. By adjusting ad size and placement it is possible to improve CTR dramatically.

Another important factor affecting whether someone clicks ads is how relevant the advert is to them. Google AdSense is a contextual advertising platform. That basically means that Google serves adverts to your visitors based on the content it scans on your site. This is why it is important to have good, keyword-focused content on the page. If, for instance, you know most of your visitors are teenagers visiting myspace, you should include keywords relevant to that audience such as ‘myspace’, ‘myspace friends’, ‘myspace music’, etc. Some keywords offer higher earnings potential than others, so make sure you target good keywords.