In early 2006, when Chloe Spencer was 15, she decided to devote a blog to Neopets, a virtual pets site popular with kids the world over.
After performing some keyword research through WordTracker and Google Suggest for her blog’s title and section headings, she discovered that “neopets cheats” was a hugely popular search term to target for her blog. So she settled on the name: the “Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site.” She then used the free WordPress.com service to start the blog.
Chloe’s site was able to ride on the coattails of WordPress.com’s trust and authority in the eyes of Google, thus sidestepping the “Google Sandbox” and jumping to page 1 in Google for the term “neopet cheats” within two weeks of launch.
By spending just a few hours per month, Chloe earns through Google AdSense between $20 and $30 per day–and it’s sometimes even as much $40. If you do the math, that’s somewhere around $700 to $900 a month for very little work.
If Chloe wanted to earn a similar amount of money through a part-time job–at her age, this typically means flipping burgers, babysitting or operating a paper route–she’d have to work somewhere around 25 to 30 hours per week (assuming minimum wage).
And best of all, because Chloe has an income generating asset (versus working dollars-for-hours for “The Man”), Chloe can take a paid vacation whenever she wants and still earn the same amount of money.
Photo by blogher.org.
