WebSiteNights

Tips for Building your Virtual Real Estate Empire
by Andrew Smith

OK, building VRE (mini-sites) seems like a good idea for making good, relatively easy income, and to some degree this is true. But this should not be treated as a residual income project but instead a high priority project with amazing growth opportunity. Let me give you some background.

In 1999 I run a successful dotcom business, I made a fortune from advertising and owned several sites that earned over $23m a year from this. But the good old dotcom crash came along and pretty much wiped me out, and to be honest I am eternally grateful. For years pervious to the dotcom boom I had sold products on and offline and had made a pretty good income from this, when the dotcom thing happened I saw big VC, NASDAQ listings and nearly wet my pants but the trouble is I forgot the core of my business. I was sooo sucked up in the IPO culture that I ignored my skills, the thing I had took years to cultivate, and that was selling products / marketing to people�.

So after it all died a death I was back to square one, selling products to customers. My long term business partner and I sat down and made a plan for starting again, affiliate marketing was still ok, so we decided to start pushing sites promoting affiliate products. After a while we competed in the same markets with similar products and made more money� then AdSense came along�.

Over the last 18 months AdSense has grown from strength to strength, maybe dotcom 2.0 is around the corner, who knows, but now is the time to begin earning monster income from other peoples need to generate customers.

We first realised how powerful mini-sites could be about 14 months ago. We had one product that we were promoting entirely through AdWords but 72% of our sales were from one affiliate, the thing is, the affiliate was not using AdWords to generate sales, instead he had a mini-site, with mini-courses promoting our products�. No advertising costs, great income� he was doing something right�. LET�S COPY ?

So we took another market, relatively large, there were about 6 main AdWords ads displayed for a few main keywords directly related to the topic and about another ten for generic services such as ebay, price matching services etc.

So we built a site. And we signed up for all six affiliate program. We had about 70 pages of content all hand written for the subject and we optimised the site to hell� then the income came, slowly at first but building rapidly into a monthly income for both of us and beyond.

Then we added AdSense

At first AdSense ads were generating about 6% of the total site income, nothing special. We started to look at AdSense in more detail and started optimising the article pages�. 17% of total income� getting better.

We then found a few more niches directly relating to the keywords and built a few more targeted pages� over 20% of the income.

Then over a period of 4 months we saw the price of the AdWords going up from $0.24 a click to $1.12, our income was increasing. We added a name squeeze page targeted at the best paying affiliate program and advertised it on every page ( an 8 part autoresponder), at $72 a sale this was pretty good income and had a high conversion rate.

Then the AdSense clicks increase to almost $2 and by now 53% of the sites earnings were coming from this.

So we hired someone to create 100 pages of additional content for us. In a few weeks Google had picked them all up and our hits almost tripled, our AdSense revenue was now earning us 81% of the total income of the site.

About six months ago my business partner and I decided to release a competing product to our main affiliate program, we have no affiliates ourselves as this would dilute the income but we make $112 profit from the product, we pimp this on each and every page and earn a good income from this but our AdSense income still accounts for over 60% of the total income for the site. The number one advertiser of the similar product pays approx $3.45 per click and position 8 pays about $1.19. We sell our product with little to no advertising costs (we still advertise in AdWords @ $0.05)

So the point I am trying to make is build a good site with good content, earn the AdSense income, look at the clicks and if the income looks good then name squeeze an affiliate product. If it does well then create your own. You will still have great traffic and either you will earn good AdSense revenue or you will make great sales� or both

Andy
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Andy is now offering a
Virtual Real Estate High Value Keyword Report click for more details

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 27th, 2005 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.