Popularized by John Reese, the virtual real estate concept is very interesting, but somewhat confusing for some web marketers, so lets start with an explanation!

Virtual real estate is NOT about offline real estate, but it is about building an ever-growing number of high quality websites that will bring in money for years to come.

Can you build virtual real estate by using automated website and content creators? Definitely not. As time will pass, it will become more and more difficult to get good rankings in the search engines, and crappy websites built with automated software and duplicate content will just disappear from the search engines results.

This is why it is important to start building high quality websites TODAY, so you will gain traffic from the search engines from years to come.

Do you need a product or a service to sell in order to build your own virtual real estate empire? Absolutely not! And this is the nice thing about it.

Creating a product takes time, and a lot of people are put off by that.

Instead, you can build content websites with information on it, without selling any product or service, and make money from the ads you put on it. By building a high quality content site, you can get a lot of traffic from the search engines, and you can monetize this traffic in many ways!

For example, you can put Adsense ads, Yahoo ads, affiliate program links, and you can even sell advertising.

To build your virtual real estate portfolio, start with a few subjects you like, because it will be easier to write content about it.

To get started, you will only need a hosting account and a domain name, you can do the rest yourself! And to grow faster, you can reinvest part of your revenue into your sites by outsourcing some of the work (content writing, SEO, etc). This will allow you to grow your income exponentially.