Hah. First-year at university I made a blog without any idea on how I was going to market it. Posted it to another IM forum I was on at the time like "LOOK WHAT I MADE!!!ONEONEONE" and someone hit the donation button for $5. I'd actually forgotten about that until recently. That site was fucking stupid but I was convinced it was going to make me millions. One day I might post it up here and you'll see just why that's so funny.
Fast forward a little to when I actually learned the basics of SEO. Which was blast SE-Nuke, Scrapebox and BMR links until you're bored of rolling your face over the keyboard and my first real income was content locking YouTube videos. I had no actual content, I just outranked the YouTube results in the SERPS and put a content locker over them.
Over its lifetime that site made $50-60,000 I'd have to go back and actually check but I never considered doing anything else after that.