when having a site already done and running what else do you have to do besides paying a host monthly and updating the site?

unless you want a site that's being updated regularly but dead, you'll need to do some major promotion. i've brought my site from 0-2 visitors a day to 250+ visitors a day in a month by promoting to no ends.

keep in mind, by "promoting" i don't mean spamming. if you want it to be a successful site, invest in advertising. you can do PPC advertising if you want (like google adwords, bidvertiser, etc.), but it's best to actually look into advertising at a site that's relative to yours. if you can find a similar site that's owned by one person, the advertising is probably very inexpensive.

thanks for the tips. how much did your promoting cost month? how long did it take to make it back up?

i think...$21. haha.
i'm being advertised at a couple personal sites that are similar to mine, and for PPC advertising, a lot of places give you a credit for signing up. i used the credits (like $100 worth or so), and then paused my campaigns so i wouldn't have to pay.

making it up took about a day, but that's because i have paid services on my site. if i was making revenue on advertising alone, it would take forever. you really do need a lot of traffic to bring in a decent income on advertisements. if you were to do google adsense, figure about 10,000 visitors a day to make about $500 / month.

i usually figure it out like this:
10000 visitors per day * 4 page views per visitor * 0.30% CTR (number of clicks divided by number of impressions) * $0.15 (average cost per click) * 30 (one month) = total amount. (10000*4*.003*.15*30 = $540)

of course, it can always be higher or lower, depending on how many clicks you get & how much you get paid per click (it could be $2 a click, it could be 5 cents a click; it all depends on what the advertiser offers).