Basically, SEO comes down to having awesome content, identifying it properly on your site, and getting other people to link to it.
What is proposed in the OP's link is NOT impossible as the various detractors in this thread would have you believe, but it IS a lot of work. The tech stuff is easy, consistently building out your backlinks is the hardest part. If you're lucky, they'll start to grow on their own and you have 100% passive income.
I didn't mean to imply that it's impossible, but that it is a LOT of work. Becoming good at SEO and marketing, then executing a good plan, is a lot of work. My site was intended to be an example of not doing that. Doing that means trading a lot of time that could be spent learning ... I don't know, machine learning or something. Is that worth maybe 2k a month? Depends on the person.
As I stated here [1], It's definitely not easy, though I've found the only difficult part to be getting initial traffic and consistently building high quality backlinks. It's not something that can be automated, but it can be outsourced.
ug, do not waste time on sitepoint, wickedfire, or the like. seobook, seomoz, seroundtable.com, distilled.co.uk, wiep.net, wolf-howl.com, rosshudgeons.com, and citationlabs are all more worthy of your time. Read The Art and Science of SEO and attend to Mozcon in June and you'll be on the right track.
I don't know about Sitepoint for SEO, but I did like that one topic I linked to. I actually learned a substantial amount of my XHTML/CSS knowledge from Sitepoint (back in 2004-2005), so it's not all bad. :)
I like seobook and seomoz, and I'll check out the other sites you mentioned. Thanks!
We have the advantage that we can automate/rip through most of the tech stuff, but there's people out there doing everything manually that are making more than you and me. :)
Yup. If you plan to enter the internet-/affiliate-marketing space you'll want to keep tabs on what this crowd of folks is up to. You'll learn that this is a space inhabited by an interesting spectrum of people...from clever, helpful people displaying an inspiring amount of hustle to straight-up criminals.
Also, careful clicking any links in those forums. Lots of disgusting, immature people over there.