Take it from me – in the past few eight years, I have been through my share of web designers. Some have been good (an absolute dream) and some have been really bad (a real nightmare). Arrghhh. Arrghhh. Arghhh. Whew, just thinking about the bad ones gives me the sweats.

Although I would love to learn web design and build my own sites, I honestly don’t have the time. Instead, I choose to concentrate on what I do best – write and let my designers do what they do best – design. And, this works well.I have to be honest though. There are times when I do create my own sites. Typically I do this to evaluate a niche to make sure it is profitable before I go all out and create a powerhouse site. When I create my own site, I use www.blogger.com or www.weebly.com because these platforms require absolutely no knowledge of HTML at all. None. Zip. Nada. You simply click and point and you can have a great looking site.However, there are often times when you need something more advanced and need to hire a professional web designer.Here are some tips to help you make the process easier:

1. Know your budget before you start looking for a designer. Visit tons of websites and evaluate their features. See what type of capabilities you would like to have and know how much money you have available for this project. For instance, do you need an integrated shopping cart or will a 3^rd party processor work just as well? Either way, researching beforehand will help you keep your costs down.

2. Get quotes (and lots of them) from various designers. This will give you a sense of the price range for your project. For a smaller project, look for a fixed price and for a more complicated one, you will probably be given an estimate. Either way, try and hone down the price before you begin working with a designer so that you aren’t in for any surprises.

3. Evaluate prospect’s portfolios which will enable you to evaluate their web designing expertise. Ask yourself these questions: Are the sites aesthetically pleasing? Do you like their layout and style? Once you’re done, compare the portfolio samples with other samples in their portfolio. For instance, does it appear that the prospective designer uses a cookie-cutter approach or does each sites seem original?

4. Interview prospects carefully. This can be done by phone or in person. During the interview you should ask them about the types of clients they’ve worked for in the past, technical knowledge and customer service skills.

5. Trust your instinct. If you don’t have a good feeling about working with a potential designer or team, then don’t work with them. You must be able to trust your designer and can’t believe that they are ripping you off. Your designer should have your best interest in mind. They should work quickly and efficiently and not pad their time for a higher fee.

6. Get everything in writing. Use a standard contract and be very clear about your project expectations, delivery and payment terms, project milestones requirements, etc. For instance, when will the site be delivered? Will you own all the rights to the design once you’re done? Will your designer use a template or stock photos? Will it be search engine optimized? Will you be required to host the designed site on the designer’s host? Will they charge you regular price for any updates? How many changes will be required?

7. Negotiate any discrepancies. Always negotiate any discrepancies in the contract BEFORE you sign on the dotted line. This will help you avoid any unpleasant misunderstandings before you get started.

That’s it. If you follow these tips, you will find the perfect designer. One that meets your needs and that you can trust. And when you do, you’ll end up with a great site and a long term writer/designer partnership that could benefit you both for the long haul.

Over the weekend, I was chatting with one of my best friends about money. I told her if she really wanted to make money online that she should build a virtual real estate empire like mine.

She chuckled loudly and almost fell off her chair. She said, “Are you still making $0.16 a month for all your hard work and effort?”

I proudly replied, “Actually, my virtual real estate empire or niche websites now bring in a residual income of $1000 a month. Yes, they used to make $0.16 a month but now they make much more. And, I make this money whether I am sitting on the beach or cutting my toenails.”

Well, she immediately stopped laughing and asked me to tell her some more.

Here are the tips that I told her so that could get started making niche sites too.

1. Virtual real estate is not a get-rich quick scheme. It is a slow money making process and takes some time and effort. You not only have build quality sites but you have to promote them too. You can’t just throw up a crappy site, slap some Adsense on it and hope to become an overnight millionaire. It just isn’t going to happen. Instead, you have to work at it, every day before you see the benefits of your hard work and effort.

2. Own virtual real estate in higher paying niches. You can’t just build sites on low paying subjects, even if you love them. Although you can have some lower paying niche sites based on your interests, you must also go after the higher paying niches too. After all, it is a lot easier to get 20 people to click on your ads that make 20.00 ($1.00 a click) than it is to get 200 people to click on your ad (.10 per click).

3. Test your market and conduct market research in order to find the higher niches. You should spend about 40% of your time conducting and testing your market before you create your sites. This way, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and energy by knowing if your site will be profitable before you build it.

4. Provide your readers with solid and quality information so that they keep coming back for more. Build content that will motivate and excite. Create sites with “staying power” so that you can get repeat clients and referrals from others.

5. Don’t ignore the rules. Always read and understand your advertisement partner’s Terms and Conditions. For instance, Google prohibits you from clicking on your own ads so don’t do it. If you don’t, your account might get banned.

6. Use different monetization methods when building your sites. For instance, you can use Adsense, Bidvertiser, Kontera, eBay auctions, affiliate products, etc. The more monetization methods you have, the better. This way if one method dries up, you have many others!

7. Always improve. Never stop making improvements to your site. Play around with your ad formatting, try different affiliate products, utilize traffic building techniques, etc. Never stop learning and growing.

8. Don’t lose faith. Virtual real estate is a great way to establish a steady and long term business. However, it won’t happen quickly. Although your sites could make a whopping $ 0.16 the first month, they could very well make $1000 or more a few months (or even a year later). You just have to keep working the process and don’t lose faith.

So, do what I told my friend, go out there and create some niche sites.Once you take action, you won’t be the joke any longer; instead you’ll be an inspiration as you chuckle all the way to the bank!

When I first started building my virtual real estate empire (VRE) over a year ago, I mistakenly believed that the more sites I could build the more money I would make. I fantasized about owning thousands of sites and imagined receiving huge advertisement and commission checks every single month. What I didn’t realize was that it is extremely difficult to manage a ton of websites.Not only do you have to build them (or have them built if you don’t know a thing about HTML and have no desire to learn), but you also have to maintain all those sites and you have to drive traffic to them as well. And that is a lot of work.Without traffic you make nada folks. Plus, if you are constantly building new sites, you’ll have no time to maintain or build up your old ones. So, your VRE never reaches its full potential and you’ll be batty trying to manage it all.

Therefore, I am going to change my focus.

Right now, I have 30 websites, 7 product blogs, and 7 informational blogs. Previously I was just building site after site, marketing a bit and then moving on to the next one. Some of my existing sites haven’t been updated or marketed in a long time.

So, in May, I plan on heavily marketing my existing sites. I need my lower performers to make me at least $5.00 a month each (they need to at least pay their domain and hosting costs). Yes, some don’t even do that (poor things). For the rest, I plan on doubling their income by implementing the same plan.

This new plan is going to work wonders for me. It is going to force me to improve my sites and will help improve my bottom line profits.

So for me, quality of my VRE empire is what counts the most, not the quantity.

Just about every single day you hear Internet Marketers commenting on the importance of choosing the best niche and how you’ll fail if you don’t pick the right one. Some of them advocate picking a niche based on one’s passion, whereas others advocate picking a niche based on the ability to make a profit. My belief is that you should do a little of both. Here’s why.

To me, it makes absolutely no sense to spend all your time writing content for a niche that you hate and it also makes no sense to write content for a site that won’t make you any money. Either way, you simply won’t get it done and will simply procrastinate because you’ll end up losing interest.

As for me, I’ve learned to only choose to make or purchase sites in niches that I have an interest in. When I make a niche site, I choose niches that interest me and are “hot.” I do this by visiting my local newspaper stand, eBay pulse, Amazon, Yahoo answers, or google.com/trends and then using Niche Inspector and Wordtracker. If you want to use a free tool, use http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

Next, I input my prospective niches and find about 100 keywords and put them into an Excel spreadsheet. Then, I perform a detailed comparison where I look for keywords with 300,000+ or fewer competing sites and ones that get searched at least 500 times a month. Next, I go to Google and make sure there are at least 7–10 advertisers (as displayed in Google). Then, I head over to namecheap.com and make sure that the primary keyword is available as a domain name. For instance, if I was building a site on dog training for smarties, I would choose www.dogtrainingforsmarties.com.

Last but not least, I make sure that my prospective niche can be monetized in several ways. For instance, I look for complimentary affiliate products, eBooks, or books by visiting Commission Junction, Amazon, Clickbank, PayDotcom, etc. Then, once the niche meets my specifications, I go for it. I then build five pages of solid content, submit five articles to the article directories, and, if it looks like a winner, I go all out by creating more articles, social bookmarking it, etc.

In all, picking a profitable niche isn’t brain science, folks. Just choose a niche that interests you and is profitable and get her done. You can’t make money if you don’t get started. Just like anything, you’ll have some winners and you’ll have some losers. The key to success is to get and stay in the game and keep chugging along with a process that works.

Now get on out there and build those profitable niche sites.