$0/month to $500/month in 6 months without spend a single penny

This is about one of my friend who is doing his automobile engineering and is still a student. He contacted me about 6 months back asking whether he can earn money on the net without spending a single penny. I thought a lot about it and this was my reply to him:

Hi *******,
Ya, surely you can do that. But I think it will take much more time to do that. May be an year or two. Take following steps, if you don’t want to spend any money:

1. Create a blog on http://www.blogspot.com on the subject of your choice (please choose a subject which interests you).
2. Use some neat and clean template and put your Google Adsense code on it to earn the dollars.
3. Give one hour every day to your blog and try to write two GOOD posts (current events, news, reviews etc) on the topic.
4. Submit each of your post to all the famous bookmarking sites like digg, netscape etc. (this will take extra 10 mins)
5. Go everyday to http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65 and see the NEW DIRECTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS in the section. Submit your site to two new directories every day free of cost.
6. Register with some forums in your niche and put your website URL in your signature. Use the forum everyday for half an hour and interact with people in the forum
7. When you start getting some traffic from bookmarking sites or forum threads or search engines, you will be making some money out of it in Google Adsense.
8. When you get your first $10, start hunting for cheap links for your blog. Remember to get ONLY related links. Please remember to put all yourmoney back into the site (promoting it) for quite some long time. Then will only it will rise.
9. Get more and more links when you get more and more money. That will give you more and more traffic. Which means more and more money.

So these are the steps I think I can tell you. Do let me know if you actually plan to follow them. 

So the main points here were to get some free traffic first, which will make you some money, use that money to get some paid links, which will increase your traffic further.

Yesterday I was discussing with him like how is his project going. So he showed me his Google Adsense for the last month (6th month). In his 6th month he made around $502. But he has put in all the money he has earned back into his blogs promotion.

Today his 300+ post strong blog (niche: cars specs and news) gets around 1200 uniques per day and make him around $500/month. He says, he still does not need any money right now, so he will be using all his money back into his blog for next 6 months.:)

Well done.