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In the offline world, a real estate empire is something that every property investor strives to achieve. Similarly, in the online world, many webmasters and business owners aim to create and manage a network of profit-generating websites, all earning them income, and creating long-term wealth. These profit-pulling websites are essentially a form of virtual real estate.

Many people make the mistake of building a website and spending all of their time on that one website. They add content, build links, etc, to build that website's presence, which is perfectly fine, but it's very dangerous to rely on the income from one website alone because of other factors that are beyond your control.

For example, your income may depend heavily on the traffic you receive from the search engines. So if, for example, the search engines change their algorithms one day, you may suddenly find your website has dropped significantly in the search engines, and you've lost most of your traffic. Similarly, if you are selling your own products, you may suddenly find that the demand for your products has slowly dwindled away and you now have an unprofitable website.

One way of negating this risk is to create your own virtual real estate portfolio. This way, if you have multiple profitable websites, even if one or two of your websites become unprofitable, you still have other websites earning you money.

Virtual real estate is similar in many ways to the real-world property market, in that in general terms the value of your websites should increase over time. This is mainly because when you create websites, and consistently build quality incoming links to these sites, over time as your site ages, you will be rewarded for building these links with a higher page rank and higher search engine rankings. This not only increases your chances of making more profits through increased traffic, but also enables you
to charge more for links or advertising space on your website, and also increases the value of your website if you wish to sell it at some point.

One thing you should bear in mind, however, is that if you're serious about building your virtual real estate empire, for long-term profits you have to make sure you're building quality websites that will stand the test of time.Junk sites will often receive low rankings, or may even get de-indexed completely, wiping out profits overnight. One thing you have to ask yourself is that if someone from Google or Yahoo, for example, visited your site, would they come to the conclusion that your site offers real quality content, or provides products that would satisfy it's visitors, and therefore merits high search engine rankings? You should be able to answer yes to this question for every website in your virtual real estate portfolio, for consistent long-term success. So to conclude, just get out there and start building your virtual real estate empire right now. It's easier than you
think. You don't need to create lots of websites that sell a certain product or range of products. You can simply create websites which provide information, where you could then display Google Adsense or Yahoo ads, for example, sell advertising space to other webmasters, or include affiliate links to products you're affiliated with. Not only that but you could also build a list of subscribers for each website through an opt-in form, so you can market to these people over and over again legitimately through email, increasing your profits further.

It is a time-consuming process marketing these websites to make them profitable, and certainly too big a subject to cover in this article, but the long-term financial rewards that comes from owning your own virtual real estate empire definitely makes it worthwhile.

James Woolley is a full-time marketer who owns numerous niche websites, and also runs a website and newsletter
dedicated to helping people make money online through internet marketing: http://www.jimsmarketing.com