We deliver this answer through our helpdesk and various other means almost every day so I decided a post might be in order. The question often goes like this, "I have had this site up for a year and it's not making any money with AdSense (or other contextual programs such as YPN) or my affiliate links, why am I not making any moeny?"

When we field a question like this we obviously go to the site and 9 times out of 10 then are 5-10 pages of content total. Not gonna cut it guys. If you think that you are going to do anything that's profitable with so little effort you are dead wrong. It takes a lot of unique, quality content to make money with organic traffic (traffic from search engines derived from people searching a term and coming to your site to find information).

Here is the absolute golden rule regarding creating a profitable content site that relies on search engine traffic:

WRITE QUALITY, UNIQUE CONTENT EVERY DAY!

You can obviously skip a day here and there but the engines like new content everyday and if you choose to ignore this golden rule you will not be profitable. In the world of search engine optimization there are absolute rules, they may change but keep in mind that everything is a formula. If the conditions of the formula are not met then that is that and there are no exceptions.