Check out this months featured money maker. 
This guy is quite smart. Essentially the owner of this site is giving away $1000 every 1000 hours. While this is the main reason why he is getting traffic, which has now reached 4000 unique views per day, he actually does post some pretty good information.
I first saw this site on shoemoney's top commenter list (which always has some interesting sites on it). I was intrigued with this idea the moment I saw it. It not only provides information about making money online but it also provides money. It's pretty neat.
It seems that this business model has been working for him as he has been giving away $250 prizes, $100 prizes, $50 prizes seemingly left and right. This gives us the indication that he is going into the hole or is actually making some good cash on this site.
Estimated earnings:
With 4000 unique views per day, I'd estimate he's making at least a few thousand per month. Maybe $2,000 - $4,000... maybe more. Who knows, maybe he'll come on this blog and let us know.
Now, here is the fun part.
While internet marketing, it's important to note what works. This system seems to be working, and working well for him. What we can do is emulate his system and apply it to internet marketing.
So my challenge to you is think of an idea that could use a similar system (without being a blatant copy) and figure a way to capitalize on it to market your affiliate products / links.
You can post them here, or just keep them to yourself. 
So, when will you be giving away a $1000 prize?
Well competitions are always great. There are already a ton of websites giving you a free iPod / Wii / iPhone / whatever, if you just sign up for some “offers”.
I run a competition on my site and it gets me plenty of visitors. I get their email address, so if they don’t win this month’s competition, I can email and ask them if they want to win next month’s comp. This means I get more entrants each time.
My prizes are nothing like $1000 though!!! Maybe I need to think bigger!
I ran a competition once. It was for $150 and it spiked my traffic for a week and that’s about it. I think I got up to 500 uniques/day.
The real question is– what’s the ratio of uniques to prize money? Anyway, I have no real input, just felt like commenting.
Yes, a one-off comment will get a little spike of traffic, but this $1000 dollar thing has REGULAR competitions, and I think this is the key. Let’s say you got 500 uniques for 7 days, so 3500 uniques and managed to monetize that traffic to get $50, then you lost money. But, if you run another competition, and use the last competition prize-giving ceremony as publicity, in the next competition you’ll get another 3500 new visitors plus a percentage of the entrants from last time come back to enter again.
I have found that running *regular* competitions is what works. Also, make the process of entering your competition valuable to your or your website. Get them to write some content for you, give you their email address so you can build a list, tell you their top 10 favorite things so you can build a keyword list, etc. This way, even if you don’t get a payback from the traffic, at least you’ve gained something from it.
[...] out those in need by doing something for charity. Well last weekend I came across this site via Jonathon’s blog and I’ve decided to try something [...]
How does he convert ~3k uniques into several thousand per month? I own a World of Warcraft related website that’s getting around 1,500/day and I’m only getting $150/month from AdSense :-z
To be honest. Adsense is the lazy man’s way to earn cash.
You gotta work towards promos and stuff…
In fact I have a great idea for you to make a good chunk of change with very little effort.
Email me for more details: jon (at) thanvolk.com
Yes, I started with Adsense, and it still makes up 90% of my earnings, but I discovered that even the traffic that I get (young kids with no credit card) can be monetized better. Neverblueads works well. And it’s only a little bit less lazy than adsense!
Neverblueads (aff link) is a great way to do like ZIP offers and such.
I’m talking to a guy on a forum about he set up some zip offers on his “youthful” visitors site and he really killed it with those.