So you just bought your first proxy. Maybe a batch of ten. You’re sitting there, reveling in the anticipatory anonymity that awaits you. After enabling the proxy you test a couple of sites.
I won’t say which sites, because they’re the kind of sites you specifically bought the proxy for, the kind you want to keep private, at least when it comes to personal use.
Yup, it’s working. Nobody knows where you are anymore.
But there’s a whole lot more to owning a proxy than simply browsing anonymously. You probably know that. In fact, that’s exactly why you’re here.
Below you’ll find 15 ways below to make money with proxies. A lot of the methods take time, dedication, and a decent amount of skill. Of course, there are also quick tricks, software-enabled schemes, and a host of lower-end crunching that all could yield in a few bucks.
But I’m going to throw a big fat disclaimer upfront and repeat it a couple of times throughout.
Proxies get a bad name. While some of the reputations are unjustified, a lot of it is completely true. Proxies can be used to thwart a great number of standard protocols on the internet.
Many of these protocols are designed for fairness and legality, usually by major internet and governmental organizations, like the United States of America and Google. Proxies can be used to break laws, falsify reality, and intrude upon other people. The use of the proxy lies in the owner of that proxy — you.
With that said, here are 15 ways to make money with proxies, broken into three categories: ethical, questionable, and unethical. Claim each as you will, and be ready to face the consequences of your proxy use.
Ethical
These are the ones you want to focus on. Doing so will build your skills and reputation, and can yield some serious earnings. Keep in mind that many legitimate ways to make money with proxies will require many proxies.
1. Setting up a public proxy server with ads.
One of the most common ways to use a proxy is as an internet browser. You simply find an free proxy site and search the internet through it so that your own IP address is hidden. This is the basic premise for proxy use on a personal level.
As a proxy owner, you can set it up so that your proxy is usable by the public. The best software for this is Glype, a web-based proxy script written in PHP that has free and paid models. For personal use its free, but if you’re looking to make some money with it there will be a licensing fee based on the number of users you expect.
You can use Glype to set up your proxy server for public use, and then enable ads on that server. If you get a high enough click-through on those ads, you’ll make money. This functions just like any other website that has ads enabled, but your site is offering the protection and functionality of a proxy for public use.
2. Using a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Tracker for Keyword positions and Google Rankings
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a staggeringly huge business these days. Everyone is dying for Page One rankings in Google and the scraping of keyword positions is the first step. Proxies are used in nearly every major scrape because no company or individual wants its IP address associated with so much data requesting, and a single IP address would get banned quickly.
If your private proxies and SEO skills, you can retain those keyword positions and rankings. That information in and of itself is worth money, and you can start a business selling that information. Or you can crunch the data and sell the information along with your analysis. There are a number of successful services that already do this: Moz, RavenTools, and PageRank Checker are just a few.
On the flip side, if you have your own business you can cut out the middle-scraping-man and do keyword positioning and analysis yourself.
Either method will make you a lot of money in the long term, as long as you’re good at it.
Related: 10+ Ways to Use Proxies to Get More Backlinks for SEO.
3. ScrapeBox – Keyword & URL scraping with proxies
I’m sticking ScrapeBox here, between SERP Trackers and Social Media Campaigns, because of its many, many features that relate to each of these. ScrapeBox is an application that you purchase once for $179. It only runs on Windows, and has a huge host of tools.
Some of the tools are SERP tracking tools. Keyword scraping is easy and simple with ScrapeBox. So is Search Engine harvesting, which finds and scrape URLs that have content similar to your search. You can compile all of this data easily and quickly.
The Comment Poster feature in ScrapeBox allows you to automate comments on blogs, which can increase your engagement and page rank with embedded backlinks.
All of these can be tied together, too, making ScrapeBox a formidable tool. Of course, to do all this, you need proxies.
This is not really a way to make money with your proxy directly. Instead, using your proxies with ScrapeBox will allow your website or business to greatly increase its viability in a crowded marketplace, which can make you a lot of money.
Related:
4. Running social media campaigns
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram are no longer places to post your daily life; they are formidable business platforms. As such, it takes a good deal of work to successfully run a social media campaign.
- Best Twitter Bots To Grow your followers on Autopilot
- The Best Reddit Automation Tools for Marketing
Simply “liking” (or “favoriting,” or “loving,” or whatever they’re calling it when you read this) is one level of engagement. Frequent posting on multiple channels, or even multiple accounts, is the next level of quickly growing a brand.
This is considered questionable by some, but if used to simply increase your follow, like, and post abilities, the proxy approach to social media is legitimate. There are two things to consider:
- Social sites like Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter don’t like too much activity from a single IP address.
- It takes too much time to follow, like, and post on multiple accounts for multiple companies.
Proxies and the right software will take care of both of these issues at once. Follow Liker is one of the best and most popular, as it allows customization of nearly every aspect of Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Follow Liker to do its thing — follow and like — it needs proxy servers.
The money-making comes into this in two ways. If you own a brand and need to do social media marketing, consider purchasing a proxy or two as a business expense. Over time you will save money because less personal time and effort will be put into your social media campaigns. You’ll yield higher results in the end, and your business will flourish.
The second method is to utilize multiple proxies for multiple brands, running a social media service for other companies. This is highly lucrative if you do it well.
5. Legal DDoS and Server Load Testers
See how the word “legal” is above this sentence? Distributed Denial of Service attacks are the most common way to shut down a website and have been used by hacker groups like Anonymous to effectively take down the government, corporate, and individual websites. As such, they are negatively associated with society. Used in this way they are illegal.
However, in order to build security into websites to prevent these sort of attacks, tests must be conducted. With a batch of proxies and certain coding abilities, you can become a DDoS tester for companies, most of which pay to test their systems.
This is often done by large organizations, but there are many unprotected sites out there that need protecting. Use your skills for good here, rather than evil.
This also leads right into the next way to make money with a proxy…
6. Using a reverse proxy to set up SSL encryption
Reverse proxies are simply explained as protective measures, almost like blankets that help to soften the blow of internet traffic, requests, and attacks. In this particular method, you can use a proxy to make Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption cheaper and easier for websites and clients. Every “safe” website must have the SSL Server Certificate to be considered safe, and each Certificate costs money.
Instead of the client purchasing a separate Certificate for each of their domains, you can use your proxy as the certified site, and each of their websites won’t need a separate one.
The downside to this is that each of those websites will have to share a DNS name or IP address. Unless you have multiple rotating IP addresses and a much larger network, in which case you’ve got a decent business on your hands.
7. Reverse proxy for caching static content
This is in the realm of the previous example, in that it requires a good deal of technical know-how and clients that depend on you. In this case, those clients will be website owners that have a lot of high-quality images on their site or anything that takes a long time to load.
Using your reverse proxy you can store their static graphical content — images are the most common — so that when a user visits the website multiple times they won’t wait while all everything loads.
This can yield lots of cash, but requires a lot more than just owning a proxy. You’ll need mad coding skills to build a successful business that provides reverse proxy services.
Questionable
We’re now moving into the questionable realm of things. The methods listed here are generally not well-loved. They bend the rules and often detract value from others and specific services. All that said, they are powerful, and many people do them.
8. Selling YouTube Views
This is a very popular use of proxies and one that YouTube (and therefore Google) certainly does not allow. YouTube videos are ranked on a number of factors, but views are the most important. Remember Gangam Style, the most popular YouTube video ever? That’s what views can do for you, your brand, you're whatever.
How many of those 2 billion views (and counting) were made by proxies?
You can use proxies and code to automate YouTube views. You do this by sending the proxy IP address to the YouTube video and telling it (through a program) to watch the video until it plays all the way through. Once this is done, make the proxy reload the website and watch it again. And again and again.
Of course, this distorts reality. But will increase your video’s popularity. This will directly result in money if you get enough views, or you can use your proxies and code to sell this service to others. PHP Proxy is a common script that helps you do this.
9. Purchasing and Scalping Tickets
You can use proxies to queue up a popular concert and purchase large quantities of tickets. Let’s say you buy tickets for that group of 100+ friends you have … oh, right, nobody does that. You’ll probably be selling most of those tickets, and selling them at steeper prices than you paid.
This is distasteful and directly harms the live music industry. But scalpers are scalpers, and they have walked the earth for many moons.
A lot of higher-end proxy providers actually have proxies meant for this purpose, specifically with tickets on Ticketmaster. This is a major concern for Ticketmaster, so the company continually updates batches of IP addresses that it has banned, making it an even more challenging and expensive endeavor.
10. Purchasing Limited Release Nikes
Did you know the selling of limited edition Nikes is a huge industry, just like scalping concert tickets? Now you do. Very similar to the above, this is a process that involves using proxies to make multiple clicks during a limited edition sale, which makes sure specific Nike models are placed in your cart (really in the proxy’s cart), which you can then sell at a much higher rate.
- The Ultimate Guide to Sneaker Bots for Nike, Adidas, Shopify, Supreme
- How People Use Proxies to Buy Nike and Supreme Shoes
Again, Nike does not condone this, but it also treats the process as focus groups for future sales.
11. Providing Access for Coworkers or Classmates
If you’re really in this proxy game to make a quick buck, think on a smaller, more local scale. You could purchase a bundle of elite private proxies — say 20 — and let a few classmates or coworkers know you can get them secure, easy access to all those websites they can’t normally access.
I’m talking about sites like Netflix, Facebook, and YouTube. These are common time-wasting sites that school and work environments specifically block, and you could reap a couple of bucks per person per week — or day — depending on how greedy you are, and what people are willing to pay to slack off.
12. Using Previously Mentioned Tools to Sell Personal Data
We’re in a data collection world, so while this is probably not above board, it is done all the time by corporations and individuals alike. It also relates to many of the processes we have already explained. Software like ScrapeBox allows you to find more than keywords and URLs — you can get phone numbers, emails, and other social media account information.
Related: How to Scrape Data from Linkedin Using Proxies?
Collecting massive amounts of this data, attaching it to keyword specific lists, and selling it to competing brands is one way to make money. Your proxies will be put to use to gain all that data. The selling part is what makes it questionable, because it really depends on what kind of data you’re selling.
Know that all major corporations are doing this in droves — data has become the ultimate worth in our internet society. Those companies are, for the most part, doing it with people’s consent. You, however…
Unethical!
The final section. The few ways to make money off proxies that you really shouldn’t be engaging in. We’ll list them in a vague sort of way because the specifics are up to you to pursue.
13. Email Marketing with Proxies
Much like the previous example, this consists of using a scraper or harvester to retain email addresses. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn — all of these sites have a host of personal email addresses visible to the public. A scraper can collect all of this information in a given keyword field and compile it neatly for you.
In the previous example, I said you could sell this information to different companies. What I’m talking about here is using those emails for your direct personal gain. Say, for instance, you emailed 10,000 people a proxy website of yours. In the email, you changed the URL to an AdFly URL, which claims to give you money every time that URL is clicked.
You would basically be spamming individuals with strange links — exactly like all those phishing emails that end up in your spam filters.
14. Craigslist – Scraping data & Posting Ads
This is worth a separate number because Craigslist is notoriously hard to scrape data from, and the company really doesn’t want you to do it. Then again, Craigslist is one of the most public and personal advertising spaces on the internet, so I understand why you’d want to try.
There are a number of tools and methods for scraping Craigslist, but the company has been known to send Cease and Desist letters to those that use its data for commercial purposes. So, yes, you can make money, but do it at your own risk.
- Proxies for Preventing Bans and Captchas When Scraping Google
- 7 Things to Know Before Scraping Amazon Product Results
15. CPA Falsification – Fake Lead, Fake click!
This is the last dirty trick in the book, so I really can’t recommend doing this. You’ll most likely get caught, and it takes as much time as some of these other, more legitimate, methods.
Some guy calls those cations as “EMU” (emulator)! Mean emulate users' actions on their own!
Cost Per Actions (CPA) is a marketing strategy in which advertisers pay you for how many “actions” occur on an ad on your page. An action can constitute a click, website traffic, new subscription, or comments. The specifics are determined by the advertiser and your agreement.
In short, CPA falsification uses proxies to create countless fake actions or impressions on your own website, thereby tricking your advertiser into giving you money.
If your batch of 10 proxies clicks on a Google AdSense ad 300 times a day for a month, you’ll see more cash because of it. Until Google finds out, of course.
Note:
We do not promote illegal activities or distribute tools for such activities. Please contact us if you believe any content within this article is in any violation of law or copyright.
More: 5 Ways to Earn More Bitcoin With Proxies.
In Proxy Summary
Do you feel better now that you know so many ways to make dough off that batch of proxies?
While proxy servers are incredibly useful, it’s the tools used with them that will determine how you make money. In the end, time and dedication will get the best results, which is pretty much true of any endeavor in life.
