In those days, SEO was fairly trivial. You could easily rank well for a keyphrase with a matching domain or get longtail hits with a script that dynamically built pages. It's much, much harder now.

At one point in that era, I ranked top two in Australia for "make money" with one page about AdSense on an otherwise unrelated site. I had another site that took half a day to build, and involved no upkeep, making similar money to Patrick's BCC. I stupidly let it (and other sites) languish and it was slowly overtaken by competitors and SEO changes.