Virtual Real Estate and Viral Communities

Virtual Real Estate has been a hot topic lately on many of the Internet Marketing Boards and Forums.  Even if you are a traditional webmaster that derives income off of content sites, and services this is a topic you shouldn’t ignore.

Virtual Real Estate or “VRE” has been talked about heavily by John Reese.    John made a big name for himself when he earned 1 million dollars in the first day he launched his product, “Traffic Secrets”.    That combined with the virtual army of internet marketers and affiliates that listen to his every word means that you are probably about to have some “new” competition if your dependent on what John calls “VRE” type sites.

These types of sites include Adsense content sites, niche sites, and my personal favorite – Viral or virtual Communities.

So, while Mr. Reese might have coined “VRE” before me – let’s talk about “VVC’S”.   The best part about these types of communities is that once you set them up, and do the initial promotion you are pretty much hands free except for some moderation.

Here are some examples of some great concepts for Virtual Real Estate:

Forums are great – because they feed off themselves.  Forums are also relatively easy to set up.  One of the best Open Source Forums in my opinion is phpBB, and you can get your copy at phpbb.com.  In many cases your host may have a service called Fantastico that you can use to set up a phpBB forum instantly. 

phpBB off the bat doesn’t have all you need to really kick it off virally.  First off you don’t generate an RSS feed – but if you dig through the hacks and mods you will find some really easy ways to get this functionality.

Once you have installed the feed creation software you just need to give your members the RSS feed or go to Feeddigest.com and create the code for them to put directly on their websites, blogs, and profiles.  Explain to them the benefits of this.

To really get the most benefit out of this method make sure you install the hack to create a forum archive and spend the time to add links in the header and footer that link back to your main site.

Want to see it in action?  Just go to Blackbeltdomain.com and you will see the forum activity on the right hand side.  Pretty cool huh?  If you look at the footer of home page at Blackbeltdomain.com you will also see that there is a link to the forum archive.  It’s a great way to give the search engines hundreds of pages of content that you DIDN’T write.

Remember the goal here is to set things up and walk away.  Blackbeltdomain is one of my partner’s sites.  We set it up and he ran it for about 3 months.  We then just hired one of the active members to monitor the forum.  We split the adsense revenue with him and everyone is happy. 

I also recently found a great script that is a forum – but it already has RSS feed capabilities built in.  It was a real easy install and it doesn’t seem to be very resource intensive.  It’s called Phorum.  It can be found at Phorum.org

While forums are a great way to set up a community and you can use some smart Search Engine methods to drive search engine traffic to them they are very hard to get going.  You can go to places like Namepros.com and actually pay people to post in your forum.  Once you don’t look like a ghost town any longer your visitors will probably start posting more.

Another way to really get the most out of the community aspect is to actually encourage your visitors to participate in your site.  Their participation will increase the amount of spiderable content you have on your sites.

Here are some quick idea’s to get your creative juices flowing:

If your hunting for the general internet crowd you probably can’t go wrong with a site to allow them to confess their sins and misdeads.  It seems these sites attract the “Jerry Springer” crowd and people love to read others confessions.  Here is a great example:  http://www.confessionstation.com   Confession Station uses a script from Scriptmonthly.com to do all the work.  All the webmaster has to do is set it up and build some incoming links.

A smart webmaster could really take this a lot further with just some minor tweaks.  I’m sure gardeners would love to confess their mistakes.  Heck – you could probably get business men to write about mistakes they made, salesmen to write about the time they screwed up the close.  Well, I’m sure you get the drift.  It’s a great way to get others to do all your work for you.  If you think about it for a few minutes you can find dozens (if not hundreds) of uses for a confession script.

Another one of my favorite concepts is to let fanatics have a place to talk about whatever they are fanatic about.  Forums on these types of topics can grow quite large, but they are a nightmare to maintain.  Forums are also pretty hard to do Search Engine Optimization on.  A solution for this might just be one of these.  We will use sports for our “fanatics”.

The first site I’ll show you that is reaching out to fanatics is for all those middle aged men who spend their time pining for the glory days that just are never going to come back.  They WANT – actually they probably NEED to talk about those days.  In comes High School Hero to give them that place.  Geographically targeted to 100’s of cities in the U.S. the search engines will help drive targeted traffic to the site.  The visitors will of course add to the content and keep the pages fresh.  The script this site is using is another one from Scriptmonthly called location Generator.

Last and not least for my example of what you can do to get fanatics being fanatical about your site is http://www.golfwarz.com.  This site isn’t horribly busy because it’s never been marketed. It’s an example of a product called SEOclickbank by Scriptmonthly that has been slightly modified (just changed a few form fields). It will let golfers complain about their clubs.   It’s not a great example because most golfers really don’t want to spend time talking about how bad they are.  They want to get better, not ‘brag’ about their shortcomings.  However, this same concept can be modified to thousands of concepts.   You could make a site to let people talk about their bosses, their cats, anything.

I’ve given you a lot of ideas today.  I hope you spend some time growing your network of websites and you start considering some of the viral strategies I’ve mentioned here.  Once you get a viral site off the ground like this – you can’t go wrong.

This article was written by Ed Charkow of http://www.Stmadeveloper.com.   Ed is the lead programmer for Stmadeveloper and has been making viral and virtual websites for his clients for years now.  You may republish this article and even hyperlink to your referral urls for any service mentioned above as long as the link to Stmadeveloper stays active.

*** If you see the value in a virtual community and don't have the skills to set it up - Ed can make your dream a reality.  

There are many scripts inside of Scriptmonthly.com that will help you do it yourself!