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It’s amazing that this thing has been posted in at least two places (this blog is one of them), and I’ve seen nothing, anywhere, coming from it. No blog entries. No discussions. Not even comments under the two blog entries. And it works – even my 2 “late afternoon” attempts have been actually making me money, which, considering that they don’t cost me anything in terms of time, effort or money, is great.
Let’s put it like this: imagine you can do something today, that, starting 6 months from now, will make you about a dollar a day. That’s $30 a month… insignificant, right?
But you can do it several times. As many as you want.
So, if you do it 10 times, in six months you’ll be getting 10 dollars a day (in average). $300 a month.. you can’t quit your job, but maybe you can pay a few bills with it, or, perhaps, finally buy that Nintendo DS you’ve always wanted, plus a couple of games. 
What if you do it 50 times? 100? More? You see, it’s something that you can do relatively quickly, and which requires no maintenance.
If you’ve been reading this blog for some time, you have probably already guessed what I’m talking about: static, niche mini-sites.
And the “six months” estimate is quite conservative on my part. Consider the following: I have two mini-sites, each made in an hour or two. One of them is a joke, which I created mostly for a few experiments with CSS. The other is a recipes site in Portuguese, which only has 4 recipes so far (I intend to add more, but I keep forgetting or delaying it). Both are very simple, only a bunch of static pages, no images, and one AdSense ad at the bottom of each page. Both were created about a month ago.
And yet they make me money. They get very few hits (they’re niche stuff, not very well SEO’d, and probably “sandboxed” in some way), but for some reason CTR (click-through rate) is quite high – much higher than in any of my blogs. Not a lot – about 20-50 cents a day, in average. There’s certainly a lot of room for improvement.
But what if I made more of them? (I certainly intend to do so.) Better ones, too? They cost virtually nothing in terms of time, work, bandwidth, hard disk space, whatever. They require no maintenance – it’s basically “fire and forget”.
And they make money. And anyone can do it.
Strange, isn’t it? It seems that almost nobody knows about it – I certainly haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere, except for the blog entry that I linked to in my own, and which inspired it.
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I wouldn’t consider it a “secret” at all. I mean, this is exactly what I’ve been showing people what to do with my ongoing AdSense case study. But perhaps you’re right that it’s not getting the attention it deserves, so I’ll probably write some more about it myself. Thanks!
Of course no one is talking about it. They don’t want everyone to start doing it then it becomes yet another “banner” thing… in other words, people learn to ignore the sites or ads when they get used to seeing enough of them.