I agree! with your point PIPES! We can save much money writing articles by own i am also looking to do same in future
Get creative with your ideas. Here's a widely known example: You have a blog/website about the coolest sports cars of today, the 90s, 80s, and 70s and earlier. Now, the keyword sports cars has a nice $/Click, but the keyword "Sports Car Insurance" is WAYYY higher, probably $6+, so blog about sports cars, put the keyword sports car insurance in your meta-keywords, and in each post say something like, "For this car, it would be atleast $X,XXX/year to get insurance for anyone under 30." ETC. With this idea in mind, you can easily come up with tons of ideas!
I have not read all the posts in this thread, if I am repeating someone else then pay extra attention. Choose something you are interested in. I continually made the same mistake for 2 years and I have finally came to the realization that I should make a site that I am interested/know stuff about.
I say think about all the things that interest you and then of that list, pick the one that has the most advertising competition.
I recently created a flash games blog at blogger. It has 3-4 impressions per day, but the clicks are the highest paying of all my blogs!
really, blichey?? I own a flash game site http://babegamer.com but the ads always pay me about 2-3 cent per click.