I’ve finally figured it out. It all coheres now. To make money off a website, you need to meet the following conditions:

1) Find a good niche;

2) Make frequent updates;

3) Be passionate about it.

That’s all, folks. Meet those three conditions, and your site will start to generate revenue in just a few short weeks. What makes me so qualified to talk about this? Well, a few of my side projects failed.

One was called Jacked Tunes, which was supposed to deal with plagiarism in music. Reason for failure – not enough updates. It seemed like a good niche at the time – find songs that blatantly rip off one another and post soundbites. However, after posting a few of the more obvious ones, I ran out of steam. I did not have enough traffic to build up following so that site visitors could update the content similar to how they do it on KissThisGuy, a site dealing with misheard lyrics.

Another site contained information about one of the towns in the area. The area businesses that didn’t have websites were supposed to pay me a few bucks for a subdomain or a slash-domain. Reason for failure – I wasn’t passionate enough about the project. It was boring trying to convince local businessmen that having a website is pretty essential. Flop city.

Yet another “floppy” project was supposed to generate a few percentage points from online sales off a local vendor’s web site. The vendor didn’t see immediate returns and cancelled the deal. I was trying to explain that he can just continue to do what he was doing, and I’ll promote the business online. I guess he was an immediate-result-oriented kind of guy.

So you see, enough of my projects failed to make me arrive at those three simple rules.

What made me write this post? Well, the project I’m very passionate about, 300SD.com, made its first $10.00 in ad revenue in just two weeks of its revamped existence (it used to be a Blogspot blog). Though this gravy train may not continue, I’m still very impressed considering the only ads I have is a little half-assed link bar at the top. Half of the ads don’t even show in Firefox (I’m working on it).

Here’s why I think this project has a future.

1) I’m very passionate about old Mercedes diesels. I just can’t get enough of them. I enjoy reading about them, repairing them, or just staring at them. I constantly look for topics to write about.

2) Through the site, I’ve found people who are equally as passionate. They return to the site several times a day, make intelligent comments, and have this warm fuzzy feeling that they are not alone in their love of old German diesels.

3) I have a great domain name. The vehicle model is 300SD, the domain is 300SD.com. Awesome.

I’m excited to say that the site is picking up steam thanks to the word of mouth and lots of search engine hits. Onto other ideas!