As the end of the year approaches

It's time to take a long hard look at the years activities. I have had some small successes with my SEO project and can report earnings of £14.38 for contextual ads and £4.51 for eBay ads giving a grand total of £18.89 in the first six months, which I am confident will cover any costs (£25) by the time it has been up for 12 months. Interestingly, this project has helped me form some ideas about the relationship between PageRank and Search Engine Results Position. I have achieved great results in terms of SERP for my keyword (which is not that difficult when the keyword is part of the URL), but I have no PR whatsoever - which leads to the question: If you are looking to be ranked #1 for your keyword, as most people are aiming for, how does PR help??
My only conclusion is that if you have found a niche keyword, you can optimise without any PR, but if your keyword is heavily competed for, you may need PR to acheive SERP??
I have tried heavily competed keywords before and got nowhere, in contrast the results for my niche keyword were impressive and more or less instant. This is one in the eye for those that bang on about needing on-page AND off-page optimisation, when you can actually get to #2 of page #1 with virtually no off-page optimisation at all...
I am first to own up that a potential profit of £10 per annum is not terribly exciting, but there are a few riders that I would add to that:

1. The rate of earnings is likley to rise from the initial faltering start
2. I plan to move this to a hosting plan that will be virtually free
3. I plan to repeat the experiment for other related keywords giving me similar income (hopefully) a number of times over.

I hope to show that this niche well-worked could be worth a few hundred pounds a year at least...

One remaining gripe is that the site is not yet listed by 'Bing', and I have tried submitting it again as I think Bing is going to be a big deal and seems to be seriously targeting Google. I will continue to keep tabs on progress with this particular issue...