-
May 4, 2006
The press release I issued
last week through eWorldWire didn't seam to have the impact I had hoped for so I
went back to the PR company that has given me my best results in the past.
I issued a press release on PRWeb earlier this week and have seen much better traffic.
What was really cool is that I was given a Podcast interview which only a
few people get to do everyday. It was pretty exciting. Hopefully the
news continues to spread about the site that sold $77,777 in virtual real estate.
-
April 26, 2006
The press release about
the huge virtual real estate sale went out yesterday. It can be found on eWorldWire.com.
eWorldWire wrote it and distributed it on all the major newswires globally.
It has already popped up on a number of sites including Google news and I'm starting to see some traffic from it. It will be interesting to see what
the next few days bring. I'm hoping to see it published in some major news
sites since this is truly an amazing sale. This even dwarfs the $32,000 auction
the million dollar homepage had.
In addition to the press
release, I'm trying to spread the news anyway I can. I've posted to several
forums and news sites. If anyone has anymore ideas for spreading the news,
please let me know.
-
April 21, 2006
It's time for the details
on last week's large virtual real estate purchase. I mentioned the sell price
was $1777. After further discussions with the buyer, this is only a deposit.
The buyer wants to own the entire state of Pennsylvania and the whole country of
Israel. He has offered $77,777 for both and plans to make payments over the
next year and a half. These properties and the amount he wants to pay are
significant
to him. As put in his own words "I know this is a
high price, and all I can tell you is this is what I must pay". I trust that the buyer
does plan to pay as scheduled and one thing for sure is that he has already paid
a sizeable deposit.
I would like to thank and
congratulate Walter Fairley of Omega-Mart. He made the large purchase mentioned above and now owns the two largest properties
on the virtual world map. At this point, he has decided to cover half of
both Pennsylvania and Israel (for which he still plans to provide me images). In the next few months, he'll provide me with the information for covering
the other halves.
One thing I should mention
is that 95% of Omega-Mart's net
profits will go to help end world hunger. This is an admirable goal and we
wish Walter the best of luck with this. I would encourage everyone to visit Omega-Mart
and help support the cause.
I now plan to have a press
release written and issued about this amazing virtual real estate purchase.
I would anticipate it will hit the news wires early next week. If anything
should draw attention to Virtual World Real Estate, this is it!
-
April 15, 2006
I finally have some time
to make another blog entry. It's been a couple busy weeks as taxes are due
in the US on the 17th. I just finished preparing mine today. It feels good
to finally have it all done.
Enough with taxes, let's
talk about the site. The first thing I should address is the large property
order I mentioned was coming. The sell didn't turn out to be quite as big
as originally anticipated but it was still a very impressive order. In fact,
it will take the lead as my biggest order yet with a dollar amount of $1777! It
is also very likely that the buyer will purchase additional properties in the future.
The buyer and the properties he purchased will be featured in my next blog entry.
I will also be issuing a press release about this large order shortly.
In the area of advertising,
I'm continuing to promote the site. I'm still running both Google Adwords
and Overture campaigns but my primary focus now is growing links. This should
help search engine rankings and ensure long term traffic for the site. The
link growth is going pretty well with almost a thousand backlinks listed on MSN.
I'm also trying a new web promotion technique using FreeViral.com. Essentially
it uses viral advertising as a way to get a very large number of visitors over time. It's totally free and seams like a great way to promote a web site. It's certainly worth checking out.
In order to really put the
promotion of Virtual World Real Estate into high gear, I would appreciate any input or help I can get from my
property owners. Please
email me your ideas and/or spread the word about the
site yourselves. I think in all industries success is best achieved by word
of mouth. Go ahead
and spread the word about this cool site. It looks much better coming from
you (a customer) than it does from me. One of my property owners plans to
write an article on wikipedia.com about Virtual World Real Estate. I think
this is great. I could have written it myself but I think it will be much
better from the perspective of a property owner.
Virtual World Real Estate
is over 3 months
old now... the time sure went by fast. I think things have gone pretty
well so far. The site has rapidly gained popularity with all the major search engines and
Alexa. It also started a large
Internet trend of selling advertising space on
maps. As far as I can see, Virtual World Real Estate is still the most unique
and interactive site of its kind.
The cool thing is that because it is much more
than a static HTML site, it hasn't been copied and mass produced like the original
million dollar home page was. I have had several offers from people wanting
to buy the script for the
site but I have turned them all down. I want to keep Virtual
World Real Estate as unique as possible for as long as possible.
Just one more quick note...
I now plan to do periodic newsletters about the site. Anyone can subscribe
to these newsletters by entering their email address in the input box found at the
top of the homepage.
Happy Easter Everyone!
-
April 2, 2006
It has been a couple busy days as I have made major enhancements
to the site.
Much of what I have done isn't obvious from the user interface but was still very
important. In a nutshell the site is now completely data-driven. That
is to say all properties are stored in a database and are displayed on demand.
Previously, the properties were hard coded directly in the page script. This
change was made in order to support future functionality. The site has grown
well and it was time for a significant overhaul.
The first major feature this change allowed for is the
property list page. This new page displays a list of all taken properties
from largest to smallest. This page provides static links to the sites of
all virtual real estate owners. These links are easily navigable by search
engines and are sure to pass on page rank (PR). The other value the property
list page provides is yet another way for advertisers to get visibility to their
sites. Any advertiser can be at the top of this list by purchasing the largest
property in the virtual world.
The change to the site infrastructure
also paves a way for self managed properties. Some of my future goals include
the ability to allow property owners to manage their own text and image. Also,
as mentioned in the FAQ, eventually I will be offering much
less visible virtual real
estate to consumers for free. It will be necessary to allow these properties
to be self created and maintained.
Another important thing I should mention about the changes made to the site is that I also
redesigned how properties behave when zoomed in/out. The new solution is much more
efficient and increases performance quite a bit. It also allows for many more
properties to be added to the virtual world without slowing things down.
-
March 23, 2006
I should apologize for the delay since my last blog entry.
I got back from vacation less than a week ago and have been swamped ever since.
Anyway, it's time to mention a couple exciting things going on with the site.
Properties continue to sell well with at least a few being sold each week.
But more exciting than that, I have a pending sale for a large number of properties.
If all goes according to plan, I'll be making a formal announcement and sending
out a press release about this within the next couple weeks.
In the area of advertising, I'm back promoting the site
again (There was a short break while I was on my vacation). I posted to a
few different forums about the site and I just purchased advertising space from
a couple more high traffic sites. This should continue to draw traffic and
interest to the site.
-
March 8, 2006
The site
is now 2 months old (as of yesterday).
It's been both a busy and exciting
couple months. As for this weeks
news, the sites popularity continues to
rise. The average Alexa Traffic
rating for this last week is 73,388.
The 3 month average is currently at
293,794. This is sure to improve
significantly over the next month.
I just finished spending some additional
advertising dollars in purchasing links
from 3 different high traffic sites.
They all have Alexa rankings under
40,000.
On a
personal note, I'm leaving on vacation
tomorrow (yeah!). I'm looking
forward to a week long break from work.
Even though I'll be on vacation, I'll
still be available to work on the site
as needed. My hotel will have
Internet access so I'll do my best to
respond to emails and post any new
properties. It may take a little
longer than normal so please be patient
if I don't respond right away.
I would
like say a quick thank you to all my
property buyers. It's with your
support that the site continues to grow.
My goal is to make this successful for
all of us.
-
March 1, 2006
It's been
an exciting week with some great things
happening with the site. The best thing
is since my last post I've sold nearly
$1500 worth of Virtual Real Estate.
I had my biggest order ever from a
company named
The
Unfold - a design and web services
division of
Himesconnect LLC. Rachelle from The
Unfold purchased over a thousand dollars
of virtual real estate including the
cities of New Orleans, Lisbon, Toronto,
Gold Coast Australia and a couple cities
in both Hawaii and the Philippines.
Another piece of exciting news is that
the site continues to move up with its
Alexa traffic ranking. The site's Alexa
ranking for today is 58,150!
As for
what I'm doing with the money I'm
making, most of it is being investing
back into the site. I want to make
sure my advertisers get good value for
their investments. This past week
I paid $299 to be listed in the Yahoo
directory and paid another $100 for a
couple other directories. This
should increase traffic to the site as
well as help boost it's ranking in the
various search engines. I
also started an Overture campaign and
released another press release.
-
February 23, 2006
I don't
have much time to write today but I
wanted to make mentioned of a couple
things. The most exciting thing is
that the site is ranked by Google now --
it is now a PR4. While a PR4 in
itself isn't necessarily fabulous, it's
pretty impressive for a site that is
only 6 weeks old. I'm sure it's
going to continue to grow as I get new
links daily. I'm looking forward
to the next update. Other good
news this week is that the auctions
continue to do very well. The one
that just ended today went for $112.
The auction also had 470 page
views and about 30 watchers. This really shows
that the site is getting some attention.
I also
made some site enhancements this week
which should make it more appealing.
I had a couple comments that the main
title and some text was a little hard to
read. I went through and lightened
them up some so now they are clear as
can be. I'm always happen to take
site improvements suggestions.
-
February 16, 2006
It's been
another busy and exciting week.
More than a dozen properties were sold
including a couple that went in very
successful eBay auctions. You can
really tell the site is taking off when
each auction goes for more than the
previous.
I made a
few significant enhancements to the site
over the last week. The first
enhancement is a new navigation
instructions pop-up window on the
homepage. Now it is easy for
anyone to get quick instructions on how
the navigate the map. I can tell
that this is already helping out
significantly. Another major
enhancement includes the ability to
select a border color for virtual real
estate. Multiple border colors
makes the site more interesting and will
also make it easier to distinguish
separate properties as the site gets
more populated. Another major
benefit to this enhancements is that the
site now looks much better in Firefox
than it did before. Firefox never
supported the glow effect that was seen
on IE. The last enhancement I did is
make it possible to have completely
transparent real estate instead of an
image. This option allows the map
to be entirely seen but still provides a
pop-up window, a border and a site link.
If you browse the map, you'll see a few
different properties where the buyer
choose this option.
In the
area of advertising, I spent quite a bit
of time this last week spreading the
word to real estate agents. I
believe this site is perfect for their
business. I have received some
great input from a couple agents and I
am now listed in a number or real estate
related directories on the web.
Things are moving forward perfectly.
-
February 8, 2006
Well
there has been quite a bit that has
happened this last week. Of course of
most interest is that I sold several
properties grossing almost a thousand
dollars over the last week. Some
other great news include the fact that
I've been seeing many more back links to
the site. If you search on MSN,
you'll see almost 200. Some of
these back links even have a very good
PR value. I'm excited to see how
Google ranks me once the Google dance
occurs sometime within the next month.
In order
to help get more high quality links to
the site, I decided to offer a temporary
link exchange. You can get all the
details on my
link
page. Essentially, anyone that
links to my site from a good PR ranked
site will get credit towards virtual
real estate.
Another
exciting thing that happened over this
last week is that the owner of my New
York Real Estate was made an offer for
50% more than what he bought it for.
He didn't accept it because he believes
it will be worth much more in the
future. It's cool to see the
resale potential of the site is starting
to show.
This past
week could have also been a Star Wars
movie because I feel like it was the
'Attack of the Clones'. When I
launched my site a month ago, there were
no map type advertising sites that I
could see. Now I know of at least
6. As far as I can tell they all
claim to be original ideas but if that
were true why did they all come live in
the last couple weeks. I'm
flattered that they like my idea enough
that it inspired them but I think the
least they could do is give me a little
credit and perhaps a link to my site.
Anyway, IMHO this site is by far still
superior to any of them and continues to
grow quickly in popularity. They
may actually be of benefit in the future
once the press researches into which
site started all the map based
advertising. I actually think I
might do a press release on how my 6
year old son inspired the industry of
selling real estate on a map. I've
also bought a few cheap links from these
sites in order to further draw traffic
and attention to my site. Having
backlinks from related sites should also
look good for search engine ranking
purposes.
-
February 1, 2006
I just
finished adding a really cool new
feature to the site. It's called the
'Sizing Tool'. The most common question
I've been getting lately is 'What size
image should I use to cover _____?'.
This sizing tool can now be used to
determine the size of image to use. It
can be positioned over any real estate
and provide an easy way to determine the
number of pixels required to cover the
real estate. The sizing tool is
available by clicking on the link found
at the bottom right of the map page. I
also just made a new entry to the FAQ
answering how to best determine the
image size to use.
-
January 29, 2006
Things
continue to progress well. Over the past
week, some great real estate was sold.
Because all the big name cities are
going quickly, I decided to reserve a
few of them for eBay auctions. I think
auctioning popular cities on eBay will
help to drive additional interest to the
site. My plan is to put another city up
for auction every week or so. I put
London up for auction on Thursday and it
has already been viewed a couple hundred
times and has garnered a couple bids.
The auction still has a week left to go.
Even though many cities are sold are
reserved, there are a number of great
cities still up for grabs.
In
related news, a press release just went
out yesterday about the London auction. It can be found featured on the American Chronicle or various other
news sites if you search for 'London For Sale in
eBay Auction' at
http://news.google.com.
-
January 22, 2006
There are a lot of exciting things happening. We are now
seeing some good traction with 15 properties already posted on the site. The real
great news is that a
press release went out Friday afternoon. I anticipate that
this will bring an amazing amount of attention to the site over the next couple
weeks. The popularity of the site will only grow from there.
-
January 19, 2006
The first property auction ended Tuesday and the winning
bid was $51. Congratulations to Luiz Rodrigues from Brazil. He walked away with
a killer deal and has chosen New York,
NY as the location for his property. Luiz owns a company named
Web World Way which
helps find the best ways to make money on the Internet. You can view
Luiz's property on the virtual world map
here. The press release announcing
the first sale will be going out shortly.
- January 13, 2006
Things are starting to pickup now. The site had a couple
hundred unique visitors yesterday and there
are now bids on the
first property. I expect this trend to continue over the next few days and
then surge once the press release is issued.
-
January 11, 2006
It's been a busy opening week. The final touches
were put on the website Saturday (January 7th) and it was finally brought online
after several weeks of work. Immediately after going online, I put the first
property up for auction on
eBay. The goal is for this to attract some attention as well as bring
in some money to do some serious advertising. So far the auction is stirring some
curiosity but no serious bidders yet. I'm sure that bids will come as we get
closer to the end of the auction (still six days away). Once the
auction ends, I'll
pay to have a press release sent out announcing the first sale of prime real estate.
Other things I have done over the past few days to promote
the site include putting a link on a
couple other websites as well as start a Google Adwords campaign. I have also listed
my site on several Internet directories and sent off a few emails to members of
the press. I hope that everyone recognizes that this is not a clone of the million
dollar homepage but is instead a unique idea within itself that has tremendous potential.
