For the past 3 years I've followed the spamming/black hat community rather closely.

During that period of time, it has been very interesting to watch the various tools that have come out to help people spam as well as the types of people who have used them.

The majority of folks have basically fallen into two categories:

1. Guru Black Hat - These are the folks who promote themselves as a guru in producing spam in some form.  They'll quite often have some type of subscription based forum, newsletter, product, etc.  Something that lets them rake in the cash to the tunes of thousands of dollars per month.  I know a few folks making over $30,000 a month using this method.
2. Users - These are the guys who are basically shifting from one spam scheme to another in an attempt to actually start making some decent money.  Quite often, they're only making $10-$50 a day, at which point the money stops coming in for them.  You'll see them moaning in the forums mentioned above or giving "advice" on how to improve your income.

Of course, there is a third group of people who quietly study what's going on, test their theories, and continue to rake in the cash.  It is, however, a treadmill in that pages that you produce today may or may not be producing income in the next few months.  Some may last as long as 6 months to a year.  Others will be a flash in the pan only lasting 3 weeks in Google (if you're lucky enough to even be indexed there).

And some, like myself, get bored of the whole thing and do a bit of consulting here and there.  The fun thing about doing this type of consulting is that you get to pick the projects that interest you and ignore the rest (or pass them on to others).

Quite honestly, that's what I love about this industry; there's always plenty of stuff to do!  Stay focused and you'll never be bored :)

G-Man

P.S.  No Matt, I'm not hanging up my black hat for good.

P.P.S.  Drop me a line via my profile or blog if you need some SEO consulting work done :)