You Are Here: Home > Articles > Internet Marketing > Article

How To Build A VRE (Virtual Real Estate)

by Varun Pratap Singh

VRE got attention of hundreds of people across the globe when John Reese showed the proof of making US$500K just by Google Adsense alone in last year. There was lots of heated discussion over this in forums.

Fortunately or unfortunately most of these discussions were negative. Most often every one complain because it's John Reese and he can do it, he has the resource bla bla bla...lots of whinning and then some more...

In fact couple of times John Reese himself posted on discussion clearing lots of things and issues.

Well anyways, his video made me consider my own business methodology and process. In fact I've changed a lot of my own ideas after watching that video.

Now let me point out...VRE is not something that John Reese comes up one day. In fact lots of people are doing it from quite a few year back. To tell you the truth, I wasn't focusing on VREs until I saw the video.

So let's stop this guru-worshipping for a moment and get ready to implement some core things in your online Business.

Give Birth To Your Virtual Real Estate

The amount of $500K did made me consider what I was doing. So I jot down one day and evaluated lots of things I was doing wrong in my own business. I shared my ideas with some of my friends and they did agreed we should proceed in this manner.

By definition, VRE is a property which can be valued and monetized, just like in the real world. We have property online in terms of sites and domains which can be valued and monetized in your favor.

One of my friends said, "It's just a new shiny phrase for network of websites."

I wanted to stress the factor of "monetizing in your favor". I want you to think of every opportunity which can make you money online as your VRE. It can be domain names, websites, blogs, discussion forums, list of e-mail addresses etc.

Before we know how to build a vre business, you need to know that the biggest hurdle to your VRE business is your love or attachment for the project.

You see, we are all humans, We tend to fall in love on with projects we have been working on. We forget that it is supposed to be a business not a hobby. So you have to decide now, if it's business you want to build or a hobby. If a business (website) is a failure, don't mind dumping it.

BTW this is going to be HUGE article, So I suggest get a mug of coffee and then sit down to read more...

Understanding The Basics Of Setting Up VREs

I wondered a lot about what should be the process to set up your own virtual real estate. I come up with 3 basic characteristics.

1. It should be easy to create.
2. It should be easy to manage and if possible,
3. It should be viral or self-growing.

There is another characteristic, which I'll discus later in this article (don't go below unless you finish reading other things).

Why I Am Suggesting These Characteristics?

I have simple reason, When you are spending your time on building VRE, you'll be dealing with lots of sites and you need all these characteristics to keep your sites alive. If any characteristic is missing, your site will grow stale.

I don't want any hassles of updating content, customer support or anything of that nature.

Now if I think hard about these characteristics, I come up with 7 kinds of sites ideas.

1. Blogs.
2. Forums.
3. Review sites.
4. Q&A sites.
5. Pure Viral Sites (I'll explain this one later).
6. Your Own Every Lasting Products.
7. Other ideas.

Now before I get down to explaining these I want to say something. You should build your business around your strengths and interests.

Like for example when I am setting up my own business plans, I prefer doing it around blogs and viral sites just for the reason I like playing with new ideas and understanding human emotions. I am going to stress on No. 1 and No. 5 for this very reason, but it doesn't mean that I won't be working around with others in the list.

1. Blogs

Blogs are easiest to create and manage. With lots of softwares, scripts and plugins you can build blogs faster than you might believe. Personally my view is that you should have Blogs in your VRE plan. You cannot go without it.

They are popular for many reasons and being personal is one of the biggest reason. It's like having a website with a voice and personality. With my skills I can create 1 blog in 30 minutes with real good content.

In AdSene empires, blogs are the most important factor. Not only you can judge a market with them but also make money.

I am giving you a 7-step method to build blogs fast.

1. Find a good niche.
2. Gather good keywords.
3. Create content in anything from 5-10 pages.
4. Install plugins for creating meta keywords and description,
5. Get inbound links from sites.
6. Submit articles related to your blog.
7. Post 1 article per day for next 7–10 days.

Now all of this can be done in 1 hr on a daily basis. I am doing this for the last 2 years, so I can do this in about 30 minutes.

Power Tip: If you are creating 5-page mini-sites on micro-niches, you can create a blog related to your micro-niche on sub-domains and link it back to your site. I also create other related blogs and link it to mini-sites.

If I have only 2 hrs to work on a daily basis as part-time, I'll put my bet on creating a blog network. As of today I only spent less than 1 hr a day on my online business.

2. Forums

Again it's easy to set up a forum. If you chose the right niche, you might see lots of crowd. In forums, users create tons of content freely for you. All you need is to find some people and get them chatting on your forums.

Personally I find it hard to create a successful forum online. Moreover, forums take time to maintain. If I have to get a crowd fast in my forum. I'd do something like this.

1. Find a niche.
2. Advertise on Google AdWords.
3. Create a viral report or movie or something which gets people talking about my forum (don't worry I'll tell you how).
4. Promote my forum online and offline.

Again promoting forums is the same as promoting your blog or website.

Power tip: Remember controversy sells a lot in forums. As forums are where lots of people interact and discus ideas. You can easily create controversies. Use this tip carefully and you'll see your forum grow crazily.

3. Review Sites

The 3rd type of sites is review sites. One of the biggest site on the Internet is a review site.. Do you which one I am talking about? If you guessed amazon.com, then you are right.

Again you have to go niche on creating review sites. Can you create some sort of twist in your review sites? How about letting people have their own affiliate links to the product.

4. Q&A Sites

These sites have the best potential for growth. You can check Yahoo Answers and Google Answers to check out how Questions and Answers sites work.

I don't think I need to explain more on this.

5. Pure Viral Sites

Viral sites are sites which grows with words-of-mouth advertising. Users visit these sites, found them really good and pass it on to their friends. If done properly, they explode like atom bomb.

Basic Definition: On the Internet, viral marketing is any marketing technique that induces websites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect.

How to create viral sites?

Whenever you have something which stirs the human emotion, it'll create a viral effect...

Marketers stirs the greed/money emotion...

Spiritual gurus stir your guilt emotion (i.e. they'll tell tales about sex, money and what not). I won't count guilt as an emotion but more as after-effect of emotion.

I give you some examples of viral sites and why they are viral.

First site is Ugly People (don't wanna link it there cuz it has some porn so viewer discretion is recommended).

This site is pretty viral. Why? People want to know that they aren't as ugly as they thought. It doesn't matter where in the world are we, we tends to think that other guy/girl is better looking than us. This sites helps people realise we are wrong.

Next site is Hot Or Not (again viewer discretion is recommended). Is this site viral because people want to know how ugly they are? Quite the opposite. Notice the contradiction between these 2 sites...

Third site I want to show you is a cutey cutey site called Cute Overload. Go and check it. No need to explain. There are many ladies I know who'd love to pass this on to their friends and there are way too many guys who want to pass this site to their lady friends to show "they care" lol.

Fourth site is Interview With God. I don't think I need to explain this one.

My suggestion is viral sites are about people's emotions (contradicting or not). Emotions like, greed, feeling superiority (Ugly People and Hot Or Not), and then some more greed...

If you just keep these in your mind, you'll make a site which has true and pure viral effect.

If you want to create another set of sites like the ones above, I can help you a bit. You know marketers always talk about things which help selling universally. These are babies, women and pets.

How about you create another site on "cute babies". The idea is, there is no mother or father who doesn't want to show off his cute little tyke. He/she'll create hundreds of pictures, movies and albums.

So you can create a site which helps people to create albums online only for babies. There is a software script which can help you create viral sites like these. I suggest you to get this script and start working on these kinds of viral sites.

How do you monetize them? You can sell affiliate products with links to babe care, parenting tips, and lots of other things. There is no limit in ways you can monetize this site.

Let me give you another example.

Another type of viral sites are networking sites like Hi5 or FanBox. You should look into viral sites more deeply from today onwards.

6. Your Own Everlasting Products

This is not hard to understand. Products like "how to lose weight", "how to get dates", "how to build a site in HTML", beauty tips etc. are timeless products. All you need to do it create a product, sales page and find affiliates who can promote your products.

This one takes time but it's one of the profitable way to generating online income. Even if you don't have products, you can do this with affiliate products.

All you need is a site, an autoresponder, a good copy of salesletter.

I have been doing this often these days, and seeing some massive success. The idea is to build a list. Before Dec. 2005 I wasn't very sure of my ability to build a list. I knew I could get traffic but building and managing a list was the hardest thing for me. After 4 months of trial and error, I am finally reaping success in this field too.

This is what I do specially for affiliate products.

1. Find a niche (nothing new).
2. Create a name squeeze page.
3. Create a series of e-mails which I can put it in autoresponder with product promotions.
4. I create at least 15-20 e-mail series. For my last site (for not so niche site), I created 52 series of e-mails. So that I can send e-mails for anyone up to 1 year. These e-mails series have good solid content.
5. I always promote good products in every e-mail series.
6. I have also some solo promotions in e-mail series.
7. My writing style is very friendly, I write the way I talk to anyone in real life. And this has given me a good response from my lists. If sometimes I dont write newsletter for my lists, people start e-mailing me with questions like "where's this weeks letter or why you are not writing?". So I guess they do like me :-D

I bring traffic from many resources to these sites by:

1. Submitting articles.
2. Advertising in other people's e-zines.
3. Posting PPC ads.

7 Other Ideas

I was wondering how else you can create VRE. While I was having a nice chat with Michael Santiago, he told me, to him it's his domain business which is like a VRE. I won't say it's exactly your VRE, but it's great method to do business. Now Michael operates a forum called Domain Forums. This guy has tons and tons of knowledge when it comes to domain business.

I personally know someone who recently bought a cool funky domain name and in less than 24 hrs, he was offered $5000 for it. Even I was offered $1000 for a domain which I thought was cool. But I never sold because I didn't bought it for selling. But again, this is crazy stuff. Buying and selling domains is big market.

Here's what Michael told me: Simply watch the news and keep abreast of the latest happenings. You can easily pick up hot domains using new words or sayings. Do you think many people knew what a blog was several years ago? Not many did, however, Michael noticed the term quickly being used in forums and around the web. He quickly snatched up the name (myblog.com) and was able to resell it for over 6 figures.

There are forums like Domain Name Journal and DNForum where you can get involved in checking out domain names for sale.

Now another good thing about these domains is that if for some reasons they don't work as they were expected to, either you can sell it or you can always put together a content site to make money with AdSense.

The Last characteristic For Your VRE Empire

Now I am going to share the last characteristic for your VRE empire. I kept this in last because this is something that is important. Unless you get your first 2 (at max 3) right, you'll fail with your VRE empire. Can you guess what exactly it is?

The biggest money maker in VREs is in the masses. That means you need to build lots and lots of sites. This is the last secret.

You need to build at least 100+ sites. If you have watched John Reese's video, He said something like several hundreds sites. Now I guess you understand why I stressed on VRE sites being easy to create and manage.

It can take a lot of effort and passion to maintain just one content site, and it will still not make money! VRE sites are like mud you throw on the wall, some mud slide down, but those clumps that stick are the ones that are in the right, profitable markets. When you can identify this few profitable sites, only then will you choose to further develop them or not.

With discipline, I can create 1–2 blogs a day. From the day Mr Reese released his video, I started building 1 blog a day (sometimes more). Now I have about 80+ blogs.

And you know what, I am making on average $0.60 per blog. That means I have these new blogs making about $48 a day. All of these blogs and sites have good content. Not junk. and the best part is, it took me about 1 hr (at maximum) to create 1 blog each day.

You can do this easily too. Imagine if you have a job and working on this part-time. Even if you are not as experienced as me, it'll take you about 2 hrs to create a blog daily. Still after working 120 hrs in 2 months, if you are making $40 a day, don't you think you'll be glad?

Here are the steps in detail:

1. You'll be spending most of your time finding a niche. The best place to get niche ideas are Amazon and eBay.

2. You'll create content either from public domain sites or from PLR sites or you can write some of your own. You do not need to create 100 pages.

3. If you are using public domain and PLR content, cut your articles into many parts (I suggest cutting it into articles 150–200 words). If you are looking for PLR articles then I also suggest PLRMonthly.

4. Create a blog about your site on the sub-domain. Add some posts (you can set them to post on future time stamps).

5. Issue a press release for the website.

6. Create your own competitive sites with different parameters (change word counts in article, keywords in RSS feeds, main keywords in your site ideas). If you do not compete for your own site. Someone else will. It's better to compete and get the cash than your competitor does. I learnt this small trick from Mr. Willie Crawford. He's one of the best marketer I like and follow.

7. Do this every day.

I hope you liked what I wrote today. Write back to me what you think about it by leaving your comment in the comment section below. Thanks for reading!

Share this article: