Digital Real Estate

One of the best business tips I advise to anyone in the SEO industry is to own digital real estate in September 2023.

Over the years I have attended hundreds of private SEO masterminds and told marketers to try and stay clear of client SEO.

My most trafficked and talked about blog created a decade ago is why you should be investing in digital assets.

Your parents educate you to save up money and buy some properties to rent out that return you a 6% yield return on investment for the rentals.

But what about a 10x newer investment model of earning over 60% ROI on rank and rent websites?

You can see just how our rank & rent model works by taking a look at the case study of a rank and rent site we carried out.

Learning the trade of SEO and investing to become a digital landlord in September 2023 is returning the biggest returns on profits for investments.

In this Digital Real Estate guide, we explain the potential growth and returns on digital real estate assets and how following a similar blueprint to McDonald’s shows history repeats itself time and time again.

Virtual Real Estate

With the digital world evolving and more people moving to the digital landscape, there hasn’t been a better time to invest in digital real estate.

The question is though: how do you make money from your digital real estate? Well, below are some main points to think about and how they can provide passive income for your digital real estate investments or just earn a reoccurring revenue.

Selling Ad Space

When you purchase digital real estate, it’s important to know how much traffic is coming to that space. If you know this, you can actually sell ad space to make a passive income.

When I started investing in online real estate, I looked for sites that had a decent amount of traffic coming to it every month. Having that established user base helps when starting as you can start performing domain monetization.

You can earn money by selling parts of your digital land to other companies to advertise their products, but remember that you will need to keep your users coming back. Make sure to create content regularly and create a social media account to attract new users. By doing this, you can increase your user traffic and therefore, increase the amount of rent for ad space.

Niche Flipping

Savvy investors know about this one and it has become a key fundamental for internet entrepreneurs to learn and utilise. Niches are always changing and evolving and it’s great to know when a niche is just emerging or if it’s nearing the end.

Try to find a virtual property that is based on an emerging niche, as the price will be low but as the niche develops and becomes more well-known, your appreciation value will skyrocket very quickly.

However, an emerging digital market doesn’t always mean that the niche will perform well. It’s important that you carry out research within that niche and understand what value it brings to the consumer and if the niche will develop into a full market, or crash and burn.

Niche Flipping is an amazing tactic for digital real estate investment, but you have to carry out the research and understand the niche before making any wild investments. If you have had success on the stock market, then this method is fantastic for you.

Online Business

You can’t deny the fact that that the digital landscape is becoming more prevalent in today’s world. That’s why so many businesses have transformed their high street shops into e commerce stores.

As a business owner myself, I’ve found more success from running an e commerce website than running a physical shop as website traffic is a lot easier to gain than customers in the real world.

In addition, the costs are a lot less with an internet property. You only have to get website hosting and domain names to start (obviously, there are other costs like SEO, web design etc. but these are optional and if you already have experience with them, then you don’t have to worry).

Compare this to real world real estate. With physical real estate, you have to pay rent, insurance, security, delivery, storage etc. It can be a lot of hassle for something than can easily be done on a virtual real estate.

Keep in mind though, it’s not that simple. You may want specific domain names but they’ve already been sold to someone else. Issue is now, your going to have to find the person who’s selling domain names you want and they may charge you a lot more due to the demand of it.

Virtual Lands

Digital currency has became hugely successful over the past decade, and this is due to how so many people are moving over to the digital land. Companies like Amazon, Google, Meta are all investing hugely in virtual reality due to the popularity of the digital worlds.

With so much investment occurring, why wouldn’t you invest in virtual real estate? It’s clear to me and millions of other people that the virtual world is becoming the next reality and you don’t want to be left behind surely?

Your physical real estate could not compare to how easy it is for digital real estate to gain exposure. Look at how many marketers are changing from traditional to digital marketing. It’s key that you start investing in digital land and start putting a stronger focus on online real estate compared to real world real estate.

Be More Like McDonald’s

Most people think McDonald’s makes their money from selling burgers!

When in actual fact McDonald’s makes its money as a real estate company.

These statistics are astonishing accomplishments, but did you know that McDonald’s makes more money in real estate than from hamburgers? In fact, McDonald’s has nearly $30 billion in real estate holdings, making it one of the largest commercial real estate owners in the world.

Peel back the layers of McDonald’s and you’ll find that the corporate entity is a real estate establishment.

“We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen-cent hamburgers is that they are the greatest producer of revenue, from which our tenants can pay us our rent.”

Instead of making money by selling supplies to franchisees or demanding huge royalties…the McDonald’s Corporation became the landlord to its franchisees.

So the burger-flipping restaurant chain makes more revenue from renting the real estate buildings than the sale of the food or drink.

Why Are McDonald’s A Real Success?

Mcdonald’s followed a motto of Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value.

These efforts toward process repetition and efficiency were how their systems were repeatedly successful.

“Building a successful business needs systems, systems, systems – if you are not creating systems of work you are building your business on quick sand”

All businesses should be system-dependent as opposed to people-dependent.

Everything that works does so because it runs on a system.

When you have process repetition and efficiency in your systems the business growth is exponential.

The Modern-Day Digital Real Estate Model

When online marketers think about SEO they register working on a customers website to help achieve higher rankings.

As a digital landlord I am not in the SEO industry, even thought the majority of my trade includes search engine optimisation processes.

I am not technically in the SEO sector. I am in the digital real estate business. Our team invest in wesbites, build out new domains, create optimised content, build quality backlinks, from which our tenants can pay us to rent the ranked websites.”

What is digital real estate?

Digital real estate is everything you see online related to real estate. A more technical term is virtual property.

Ownership of digital real estate isn’t just owning a website. In actual fact, digital real estate can come in many different forms, just like in real estate in the real world.

Types of Digital Real Estate

Some of the main examples of digital real estate are:

• Affiliate websites
• Branded domain names
• Lead Generation domains
• URLs to sell sponsorship deals
• Social Media Groups
• Metaverse Real Estae

All forms of digital assets are worth serious money as the internet grows in the amounts of consumers every day.

Why Should I Buy Digital Real Estate?

The main reasons you should be looking to buying digital real estate include the following:

Growing Market

In a world where nearly everything is online, digital real estate opportunities are one of those investments that are only growing in popularity.

Year in and year out, more investors are looking at ways they can expand their digital property empire, so the quicker you can get in yourself the better.

Increase Diversification

Investing in digital property is a great way for an investor to expand their portfolio of investments, and as we all know, it’s great to have your eggs in many different baskets when making investment decisions.

And when it comes to investments to make, having digital assets is super important in today’s ever digitalised world.

Self Employment Prospects

Being someone that invests in digital assets is a great way to work towards becoming self employed, as these digital properties can make considerable residual income overtime.

You may find that once you have enough successful digital real estate to your name, you’re able to work independently off of the digital properties you’re earning from.

Inexpensive to Begin

Investing in digital real estate can be an inexpensive investment, and really it’s a much as you want to put into it that matters.

Some people who are more cautious investors love this investment type as you can start off with smaller digital properties and work your way up.

That being said, if you’re someone that enjoys going all out with your investments then the sky really is the limit with digital too, it totally up to you.

More Scalable than Other Investment Opportunities

Once you begin to get the systems and processes right with your digital assets, this formula can be rinsed and repeated across all of your digital properties, and scaled to heights that other investment opportunities can’t reach.

It’s completely up to you how quickly you want this process to happen, though.

When Should I Buy Digital Real Estate?

Remember, procrastination is the thief of time where someone who continually puts things off ultimately achieves little.

If you are looking for investment opportunities you should be buying digital assets today.

“Do not wait to buy digital real estate, buy digital real estate and then wait”

As with all investments, nothing is guaranteed, but investing in digital real estate has certainly proven to be a viable source of wealth generation.

Year on year digital real estate is on an upward trajectory and the upward trends are going to continue for the next decade.

The positive trajectory asset price in 2023 is hitting a series of higher highs and higher lows and predictions suggest the sooner you can look to buy the better as the upward trend is set to continue month on month.

How much does digital real estate cost?

The costs of digital real estate could be as little as $9 for a domain name and then your personal time in building out the web pages.

On average the investment needed to buy a ready-made ranking website is approx $7000.

It has been known for some large affiliate websites to be sold for upwards of $25,000,000 so the prices can vary massively.

Unlike many other investments, you can get started in building out your digital real estate for free using web2.0 properties, social media platforms or creating free digital products.

Within our mindset meetups, we regularly talk about wasted time is worse than wasted money and if there is a way to fast track you to success or save you time by buying an existing digital real estate property we would always recommend this strategy.

How To Improve Digital Real Estate Websites?

Here are many ways to improve your digital asset real estate websites:

• Let it age (generally speaking the older a site is, the more trust it holds)
• Optimise existing content using tools like surfer SEO or marketmuse
• Carry out content expansion strategies to rank for Google Passage ranking
• Build tier two backlinks to your existing relevant links
• Build new guest post backlinks to your most important pages
• Purchase a social signal service from Signal Boy to improve trust factors
• Buy Wikipedia Backlinks from Wiki Wookiee to improve the trust in the website
• Improve silo structure and internal linking
• Run a technical SEO audit and fix all errors
• Buy the ranking blueprint SEO audit to analyse what areas of content you are lacking and also what backlinks your website is missing
• Improve CRO to get higher conversion rates from your traffic

Can Digital Real Estate Investing Be Dangerous?

As with all investments, nothing is guaranteed, but investing in digital real estate has certainly proven to be a viable source of wealth generation in September 2023.

Investors are always eager to invest money in upward trajectory trending industries, but what can you do if your digital real estate website starts a downhill trend?

Can You Recover Your Digital Real Estate Website From a Google Panda Penalty?

If you have invested money in a digital real estate website and been hit with a Panda Google Penalty you can certainly recover from the drop in rankings.

Panda Google penalties are all related to thin content web pages or lack of topical authority on a subject.

Here are several ways to recover your website from Google Panda Penalty:

• Run a Copyscape audit and edit all duplicated content as Google prefers uniqueness
• Run a Screaming Frog audit to fix your click depth through internal links
• Buy a Searcharoo Ranking Blueprint to give you a thorough content roadmap
• Export all keywords from Google Search Console (if restricted on export then use SEO Testing Tool) and load the list to Keyword Cupid to group keywords to match the search intent for each web page
• Write the pages it shows from Keyword Cupid to cover the topical models and get past the authority wall
• Get an editor to update all posts with a marketmuse optimisation and give the web pages a Content Freshness Update
• Create a Progressive Optimisation Content Plan as you should continuously improve old content to make current in September 2023

Recovering from Google Panda penalties can see your rankings dramatically jump in the SERPs and this is perfectly normal and known as the Google Dance.

Persistence is key in keep building up your topical authority to help you recover and bounce back from a dramatic drop in rankings.

Can You Recover Your Digital Real Estate Website From a Google Penguin Penalty?

Here are several ways to recover your website from Google Panda Penalty:

• Acquire new backlinks because old links suffer from backlink atrophy or your site might not have enough backlink power
• Acquire reverse sink or swim relevant guest post backlinks as your site might not have enough relevant backlinks
• Carry out a comprehensive disavow to remove all spammy backlinks pointing to your website
• Start to build your link velocity up using a professional link building agency
• Justification of backlinks is important to get some real social engagement from Signal Boy
• Having diverse backlink profiles is important so build business directories to get more naked URLs and nofollow backlinks
• Wikipedia links are part of the trusted weblink graph seed websites so buy some from Wiki Wookiee for trust signals

Recovering from Google Penguin penalties can take time and the main element of the work is the diversification of your backlink profile.

Usually a penguin penalty has been issued because the backlink profile has too many homepage links, over optimised anchor texts or hyperlinks are placed on high detox risk web pages.

The aim is to build a low detox risk score and high trust score for your backlinks pointing to your digital real estate website.

Will the Digital Real Estate Market Ever Collapse?

Honestly, I can’t see that happening. As humans, we seek to always improve on what we have and the digital worlds that are being created seem to be the next step of evolution. A lot of people are looking into internet entrepreneurship rather than it’s physical counter part because of how easy it is.

Physical property will always be at risk due to a lot of external factors we can’t control, but digital property is a lot safer as we can control certain aspects and avoid certain negative impacts (not all of them though).

Digital real estate works. My whole company is based off the principle of digital real estate investing and we’ve seen huge growth over the recent years. Digital real estate investors are becoming more prevalent as it’s a smarter investment to make.

If you’re still sceptical, then why not try a rental property? You can often pay an online business to direct leads to your business and earn a profit that way. Or, why not try some online courses and brush up your digital landlord skills and dominate your niche.

In my opinion, I think now is the perfect time for digital real estate investing as you don’t have to be a genius to see how the world is moving from the physical world to the digital one.

How do I Know the Worth of my Digital Real Estate?

Your digital real estate’s worth is decided on numerous factors, which include:

• The position of your digital real estate on the SERPs
• The amount of traffic your virtual real estate receives
• The quality of content displayed on your domain
• Intellectual property displayed on your website
• The digital products/physical products you are selling
• The exposure of your domain on social media
• And more!

It’s up to you what price you set for your digital property, but using the factors above can help give you more reason to increase/decrease the price of it.

Of course, if you’re looking to create passive income, then you might hold onto it and decide to sell leads or ad space but in the end, it’s up to you.

Summary

Were you surprised when we said: “Consumers think of McDonald’s as a burger restaurant, but in the business world, McDonald’s is considered a real estate company.”

Do you own the real estate in your industry or are you working on other properties you do not own?

When the property is not owned by yourself you seem to be held back with more questions by the owner – why, how, what, when and where.

Our lead generation model requires us to know how to rank and be ahead of the game when it comes to SEO strategies in September 2023.

If your SEO skills are not the best then this article is not for you because without rankings your digital real estate is worth zero.

But if you genuinely are advanced in search engine optimisation you really need to start considering investing and owning the digital real estate of websites.

James Dooley

Entrepreneur

James Dooley is a British entrepreneur, SEO, investor, and philanthropist. James has built a huge Search Engine Optimization team that focus on organic SEO endeavours, including affiliate marketing, lead generation, as well as SEO services.