I have about 3-4 sites that I closely manage, and about 5 others that I've put on the backburner for now.
I learned about IM techniques about 2 years ago but I haven't been really seriously with implementing them until 4-5 months ago. Money is also an issue for me so I couldn't invest in the programs I needed to which slowed my progress.
I haven't made a ton of money, probably around $500 total, but my main websites are in their infancy and I plan to continuously add content to them throughout the year.
To be honest, I can be lazy when it comes to writing, but I'm also a stickler for using unique content on all my money sites, and even the majority of my Web 2.0s. Probably a bad combination but I'm getting better at increasing my speed on a weekly basis.
Once I get a few more checks I will begin outsourcing because I understand how much that will increase my productivity. I've used the money I've made so far to buy more tools such as AMR and Bookmarking Demon.
Even with my limited experience, I've tested out a few things...
For example I have one domain which I've only used Scrapebox to build links. It spent 3-4 months ranked anywhere between 100-300 but it's starting to pop up on page 1-3 now for some long tail phrases. Now that I'm close to page 1, I'm going to ramp up linking efforts and write some articles/blogs.
Another domain I submitted 4 articles to the top 3-4 article directories manually (before I owned AMR), and also did a Scrapebox run on related niche blogs (probably only got 10-20 comments posted). This site wasn't in the top 1000 for 4-5 months, and out of nowhere I'm in the top 50 for 5 of my main keywords. Again, I plan on linking more to this site to get to page 1.
My 'baby' if you will is a technology blog that I setup about 2 years ago. I posted about 8 times in that span, but I'm making sure that now I'm posting every week (and only on topics/titles that I've done keyword research for).
Most of my traffic on this blog comes from 1 post, about 500 visitors a day from several variations of the main keyword.
Seeing myself go from 5 visitors a day to 500 visitors a day almost overnight was exactly what I needed to motivate myself further. It took 3-4 weeks to reach page 1, using only AMR to build links, but the traffic gushed once I got there. It's been a steady 200-500 everyday for the past two months, and my adsense revenue went from almost nothing to $2-5 per day.
It's nothing to brag about, but as a beginner it shows you that passive money is out there and it doesn't take an expert to grab it. The hard part is getting the ranking, but if you find the right keywords or hit on an upward trending keyword you could find yourself in a situation where you're pulling in even more than that from a single post or website.
Once you see this, scale up. My main limiting factor is the rate at which I spit out content but I'm going to use the age of my 'baby' blog to my benefit. I plan on writing several more posts on there to get some $$ in my pocket. Once I have that I can outsource and build more websites about topics that I'm vaguely interested in.
But it's the truth that you may spend just as much if not more time promoting your site than you did building it. This includes scraping URLs, writing articles, writing blog posts, posting on niche forums, etc.etc.