Forget Chores For Pocket Money — Teen Makes $900 Per Month Doing SEO

Aug 2, 2007 at 8:04am ET by Barry Schwartz

Forget Babysitting and Paper Routes, Teen Turns to SEO from Stephan Spencer at News.com highlights one teen who earns on average between $20 and $30 a day on her blog through Google AdSense.

Stephan knows 16-year-old Chloe well — she’s his daughter! Chloe she was invited to present at the BlogHer 2007 Conference. She has a very popular site named Neopets Fanatic, which she started as a hobby and then began earning money through AdSense.

Here is a video of some of her presentation at the conference:

She tells the audience how she got into doing the blog and using SEO, with some help from her dad, to generate traffic. Stephan points out in his write-up:

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.

To be honest, I am not amazed or surprised by this news. I see it every day when I track the AdSense forums for discussions. Probably a quarter of those members are teenagers trying to earn money blogging or making resource sites and monetizing them with AdSense.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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