I have just got a blog up to average 60% of daily organic traffic just by Google alone by just writing original content and updating the blog once or sometimes 2/3 times a week. I don't go crazy on keywords and I just write about what I like within my niche and it seems to be paying off! I don't bother with major backlink projects or using keywords and building a article around keywords. I don't use bookmark sites unless its a really good article I am proud of, and I only do link building if I like a article or blog and thats quite rare. I find my backlinks are from people who ask me to rarely do a guest blog or they just link to my blog. Just by doing my blog as a hobby sort of thing and just doing my own little thing I have managed to get a blog thats about 4/5months old to over 15k unique hits a month and adsense its about £300 a month(you convert to dollars). Those that are sitting on your pcs looking for the adsense magic key and looking for the $100adsense keyword are just wasting time, why not just pick something that you really know something about and stick to that subject, grow your website or blog and just do things in your own time and the rest will follow! Dont go chasing magic codes, $100000 a day ebooks or instant money making websites as while your doing that you not going to earn anything except for a few dollars. Leave the pagerank dream to the link farmers, as pagerank is nothing more that a virtual penis extension for webmasters. Basically chill out, write what you know and spend nothing more than a bit of time.
We have a handful of fun websites we created just to create. They aren't monetized in anyway and some do get some decent traffic.
Thats what im doing exept i link my blog from other websites in my signiture becasue some people might find it useful information ^_^. Other than that im hoping google will do the rest
That's how most profitable blogs started. The blogger started writing about a topic that he enjoys. People start reading and linking to your content if it's good. Search rankings start falling your way. This is why it is important to pick a niche that you are familiar with and enjoy writing about. The readers can tell the difference. If you are entertaining and informative, they will bookmark you and pass your blog along to friends.