When you think about it, making money on the internet is pretty easy. You just have to do one important thing (once you build your adsense page and optimize it)- get people to go to your page and hopefully click an ad. In the scheme of things the page building, the article writing, the learning SEO is all just a bunch of skill sets you can learn and apply very easily again and again. The true skill comes in when you learn about off page optimization, backlinks, and traffic. Link popularity and backlinks are the same thing, its all about getting others to link back to your page and although it sounds like the easiest part its actually not.