Virtual real estate is becoming more and more lucrative as the "overnight successes" (spam sites) are disappearing due to search engines "sand boxing" all new sites and de-listing spammers.

Gone forever are the days where anyone with moderate experience could come into a market and dominate it within a month or two in the search engines. Since Google and other engines no longer reward new sites of any kind with immediate results, only the mature, savvy e-real estate investor will win the day in 2006.

Smart niche site network publishers have been gearing up for 2006 with solid, well-thought-out site designs, content strategies, and niche research to place content rich sites up with no other goal than to let them grow and season into very valuable properties in 6-8 months time.

Having a site entrenched in the search engines means you have been around for at least 3 months - and that is stretching it. Rewards are coming to those who wait patiently. And only to those content site publishers who build real sites, not the spammy sites we were all waiting anxiously to disappear from the engines last year.

Finally, content, which has been referred to as "King" for years, (but treated in reality like a cheap whore until recently) is truly the focus of smart investors looking to build a network of sites on special niches to attract lucrative advertising and product sales revenue.

Many virtual investors and developers who have built now popular sites are selling their networks for millions today.

And this is the real "out." Smart virtual real estate investors not only build to profit in the short term, but are building popular sites and networks of sites with an eye to cash out big in the coming year.

All it really takes is good research, creativity in isolating a market, and most of all - patience. The longer you let your network grow and season and the more popular you make it with strong promotion tactics, the more it is worth to investors who are looking for any site network that moves traffic.

The second level of virtual real estate investing is buying up networks of content sites and focusing the traffic on profitable product lines, affiliate product sales, services of all kinds, and for advertising revenue.

Investors who sell traffic via banner advertising, pay per click, and any number of text linking schemes always seem to have a higher demand for ad space than traffic supply. This will continue to be the case in the coming years and smart niche site publishers are banking on the advertising industry's insatiable appetite for good targeted traffic.

Once people get over the Adsense boom and bust period of 2005, they will start to realize that Adsense is merely "funded research" and the big game is the virtual properties themselves.

Biggest mistake in 2006?

Spam sites! Once they are dropped out of the engines, and they all have been or will be soon, they are totally valueless. Complete and utter failures from the domain name to the time and money poured into them.

Yet publishers who go the extra mile and exercise a modicum of respect for their industry are still floating the wave of profits by creating real sites.

Think about it this way: A publisher who starts from nothing today and builds one rich content site per week in 2006 is going to have about 52 sites this time next year.

With a good marketing plan for each site which includes no SEO tricks and nothing even "grey hat" in the mix, she should have the ability to isolate 10 sites in her network worth spending more time on than the others. This is given that the revenue model for each of the 10 sites is producing at least $10 per day.

Turning those 10 sites into $30 a day earners can pluck up over $100,000.00 in revenue in a year's time! With good research on profitable niches to provide with good content, and a simple but solid marketing plan for each site, anyone with the proper training and patience can get into the game.

Now the publisher in the above example is pulling in $300 per day with just 10 sites. Last year it took upwards of 100 or more spam sites to do the same thing with no hope it would continue from day to day depending on when the engines caught up with them and de-listed them.

The publisher in the above example can keep that money rolling in indefinitely without fear because her 10 sites are perfect content sites that search engines love. No tricks and no spam software involved.

A publisher can then go on to find the next 10 winners in their network or continue to focus on the current 10 with an eye on drastically improving one or all of the sites' profit margins with ramped up marketing and content development.

Now comes the great part. A publisher who finds their 10 winners and develops them into sites that average 300-500 visitors per day each now has a network of sites pulling in 3000-5000 eyeballs each and every day.

Depending on the markets served with the 10 winners, a site network like this, which has proven revenue and traffic, can easily value from $150,000.00 and up these days.

Why? Because of the traffic, proven profits, and the quality of the sites themselves. This is something that was totally forgotten in the Adsense spam site days. The guys who built 5000 sites with no more value than a single, traffic-less affiliate casino site have lost everything they worked for. Once they were out of the engines, they were out of business.

And they have nothing to sell. No assets. No content means no value. No search engine rankings means no serious traffic and no revenue.

But the publisher who built just 10 content sites last year that are now doing at least $30 each per day is sitting on not only $109,500.00 gross yearly revenue, but also a network worth far more than that which they can sell to rabid investors looking for just such a deal to land in their lap each and every day.

Again, all it takes is knowing the niche publishing industry and the tactics for creating and marketing content rich niche sites and a little patience.

This is what the market wants. All you have to do is give it the elbow grease it deserves to reap massive profits down the relatively short road to success.