A friend of mine bought a domain for the sole purpose of turning it into a PPC site. He picked one that had to do with mini-blinds, filled it with relevant content about mini-blinds, SEO'd it, and now makes hundreds of dollars a month off AdSense from it. It's possible to turn $500 into $5000, but don't expect it to be easy. You're going to have to do at least $4000 man hours of work to get it. Make sure you're taking into account opportunity costs of what you could be doing with your time otherwise.