Recently there has been major interest in 'Vitual Real Estate' (or VRE) resulting in many people wanting to own websites which make money through Google Adsense. This increased interest created a demand for ready made websites with the Adsense code built in, but are these websites the VRE solution their creators claim them to be?

That depends on what their new owners do with the websites...

The vast majority of people will upload the website 'as is' and pray fervently for an income from it, which is never going to happen as demonstrated by the following two reasons:

1) There are many identical websites on the internet, and I do mean identical, in every aspect - mirror images. While the search engine's duplicate content filters may be limited in their abilities, they can and do spot mirror image pages and will filter them out.

2) Every website is targeting the same keywords which mean sudden instant competition. The website that gets top ranking for these keywords is going to be the one with the most inbound links.

Not looking good for the 'upload and pray' website owners is it?

If you're looking to buy a website with the view to uploading it 'as is', forget it, you're wasting your time and money. You have to modify the website, and then promote it, before it will reward you with an income.

Assuming your website is created from private label articles, here are a few tips for quickly modifying your new website:

1) Change the titles of each PLR article page - One fairly big chunk of text on every page is the website menu. Most VRE websites use dynamic menus, meaning you just have to upload a webpage into a directory (or folder) and it will automatically be included in the website menu. Because the webpage title is invariably used for the menu link text, by changing all the titles you change a good percentage of the text on every page.

2) Change the keyword targeting of each PLR article page - By choosing a different popular low competition keyword for each page you eliminate nearly all of the new competition created by the other website owners. At the very least, each page should be optimized with the keyword appearing:
- In the Title (i.e. between the title tags)
- In the Description Meta Tag
- In the Keywords Meta Tag
- In the Heading (i.e. between h1 tags)
- Once in the first sentence and then once in every paragraph.
- In the webpage file name - You could use the title as the file name, just replace the spaces with hyphens ( - ) or underscores ( _ ).

3) Place a 'Sponsored By' text advertisement in the middle of the article text - This will break up the existing article text and assuming you've changed the keywords will give the PLR article page a slightly different 'fingerprint' and give you the edge over other website owners. The quickest way to do this is by using a server side include for the advertisement...

Even though you've now got the edge over the other website owners, your website will not earn a cent unless you promote it. Here are a few tips to get you going:

1) Place a link to your website in every related directory you can find. For a list of SEO friendly directories enter "seo friendly directory list" into your favorite search engine.

2) Trade links with websites of a similar theme to yours (or buy one way links). When you first start out you should look for websites that receive a fair bit of traffic, as some of this traffic will be funneled through the link to your website. For more effect, get links to each PLR article page of your website (i.e. use different linking text for each page).

Finally a promotion tip which while not mandatory could mean the difference between your website earning $1 per day and $5 - $15 per day...

3) Write (or have written) several articles on a similar theme to your website and submit them to the major ezine and article directories. At the end of your article you are allowed to add a resource box, consisting of a few lines in which to place an advertisement for your website plus a link to it. For more effect, write and submit several articles which link to each PLR article page on your website (e.g. a 5 page site could have 5 x 5 = 25 articles).