I'm only doing about 6k for this month. That really sucks! My highest ever was 17.2k earned in Aug of last year. Man, I miss those days!
And Joel Comm *MUST* be the authority on AdSense??! Because he wrote a book on AdSense, turned it into a business, and took the fame??! Most people who make good money, don't reveal how they are doing it. Believe what you want, but I will be releasing my "formula" within the next couple weeks. www.thenewadsense.com
What most people don't tell you when they tell you how much they made is how much they spent to get it. It costs roughly $93 a month to run all of my sites. I should break $400 today or tomorrow. The most I made in a single month was about $1700. And more than 90% of that was from a site that costs $7 a month to run. The formula is simple: get visitors.
Work, work, work. Providing useful, original content is the key to everything. To be really sucessful long term it takes a lot of hours of researching and writing good, quality content. It also takes a bit of strategic marketing to get people to come to your site. Using AdWords and other PPC programs as well as some good SEO work is vital to get your site running in the black. If you provide good content people will come back regularly without having to click on your ad(s). It's also a good idea to maybe put together a newsletter to send out to an opt-in list of subscribers to let them know whats new on your site. Free marketing is great!