You are right, back then it was easy to use an EMD to pull some traffic on your site. But that has changed lately. Currently, even with an EMD, you are not guaranteed of traffic. Nowadays, it is all about the quality and consistency of your content. Traffic will go to the site /blog that provide value to the audience. Also, Google is keen on authenticity of the content today than it was back in the early to mid-2000s.I did somewhat in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Well, it was a couple of hundred $ a month, something like that. Anyway, I exploited exact match domains so it was kind of a scam as there was no good content. Well, I was a newbie.