So every designer has that one project in their closet that they never like to talk about. About 2 years ago I decided I wanted to try my hand at some passive income with AdSense. I didn’t know anything about it really on top of not knowing what type of site to do or how to make one dynamic enough to update. So it was all a big exercise and learning process.I managed to squeeze out a “Hot or Not” type site about vanity plates called CoolPl8z. It’s something that interests me, something I could get plenty of material for living in VA and something that by nature, people are vane about in the first place so they’d be open to sharing. So I hacked together some PHP tutorial scripts, a simple DB and got an AdSense account.I did some simple SEO techniques , posted on some auto forums and for about 6 months watched my traffic go from 1 or 2 hits (by myself) to about 10 a day over the course of a few months. The I started getting linked up all over… AutoBlog, Yahoo, Cool Site Of The Day and tons of blog posts about the site or plates on it. It’s grown a ton over the last 2 years and I’m #1 and #2 for most vanity plate terms now.This week the Associated Press wrote an article about vanity plates and interviewed me and many plate owners about the subject. It was a nice little surprise to finish off the weekend seeing my daily traffic go from about 500 uniques a day to way over 10,000 as of 9pm EST. CHKITOUT