Recently, at the BlogHer conference in Chicago, my 16-year-old daughter Chloe gave her first conference presentation on “professional blogging.” Chloe got to share her story about “making money while she sleeps,” based off of the popular virtual pets site, Neopets.

Watch some of the highlights from Chloe’s panel at BlogHer:

At 15, Chloe, like many teenagers, was looking for a way to make money. She had decided that she didn’t want to mow lawns in the neighborhood, babysit, or flip burgers–instead she hoped to turn her love for Neopets into dollars, by simply making a few, smart SEO decisions using keyword research tools like Google Suggest and WordTracker, and find trusted sources to build links for her blog. With the success of her blog, Chloe attempted to integrate Google ads, but wasn’t able to because of WordPress.com’s restrictive terms of service that forbids the use of AdSense or other third-party ads. Not long afterward, Chloe moved her entire blog to the domain neopets fanatic.com, which is currently ranking #4 for “neopets” out of 6.2 million results. (I’m so proud of her!!) Currently, her blog produces $20 to $30 per day in AdSense revenue, which totals an average of $700-900 per month for only a few hours worth of work on the site. If Chloe were working a minimum wage job at McDonalds, she’d have to work 25 to 30 hours per week to make that amount of money!

Chloe’s story should not be an unusual one. Anyone can turn SEO common “sense” into “cents,” by using the knowledge and the tools that are available.