Zach Brooks pocketed $1,000 this month blogging about the cheap lunches he discovers around midtown Manhattan -- $10 or less, preferably greasy, and if he's lucky, served from a truck.


The site, Midtownlunch.com, is just a year and a half old and gets only about 2,000 readers daily, but it's already earning him enough each month for a weekend trip to the Caribbean -- or in his case, more fat-filled culinary escapades in the city.

In the vast and varied world of blogging, Brooks is far from alone.

It's no longer unusual for blogs with just a couple thousand daily readers to earn nearly as many dollars a month. Helping fill the pockets of such bloggers are programs like Google's AdSense and many others that let individuals -- not just major publications -- tap into the rapidly growing pot of advertising dollars with a click of the mouse...

In the first few months I started using AdSense ads the amount I made monthly was not more than a few hundred dollars. But as time went buy, total commissions started to improve significantly.

When they reached a few thousands dollars per month ($3,000-4,000), I started to reduce my commitment to my main professional customers and decreased my willingness to accept new orders.

I pushed on the accelerator and gave the best I had. Have worked for 14 or more hours a day, without interruptions and without holidays until numbers and traffic duplicated and then tripled.

When I reached about $10,000/month, I could not believe my own eyes and finally resolved not to accept anymore external jobs to fully focus only on this new work.

I realized that this was what I really wanted to do and decided to invest further resources and time into it.

I opened a few extra web sites, newsletters, started some parallel experimental projects - not always commercial - and kept working at sharing my best insights and discoveries.

"Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."

If you put a mouse in a maze without cheese, it'll wander and then become lazy. However, if you put cheese in the maze where it can smell it, then it'll look tirelessly for it. In fact, it will look for it, even if it has never had cheese before.

On some level, I feel like like life is similar. I can't definitively tell you whether or not there is cheese, but I can tell you that I can smell it. And once you've smelled cheese, you can't tell yourself you haven't or accept laziness. That is why my purpose is to make manifest this feeling of something more, of this potential inside of me - This is the core behind everything I do and have known.

I don't know if I'll get to the cheese in my life-time, but I do believe that it is only a matter of time before we as a civilization or we as life itself will taste this cheese. Just like a maze, evolution is not a straight line, but it does lead somewhere.

It is not a question of if, it is a question of when.