Adword Placement - Part Time SEO Experiment

Long time lurker, new poster here. I have been learning alot on this forum and am working on building my first "niche" site. You can follow my progress on the site: parttimeseo.com (I can't direct link yet until I post a few more messages).

You can see on there how I found the niche I want to persuit. Now, I need to see about actually building the site. The site I am going to produce is going to be very simply and easy to reproduce. It will look pretty much like the parttimeseo.com site. I will customize the header and links around my niche and may possibly add some things if it is useful on my particular niche site.

My Questions to the experts here:

• What is the best revenue-generating strategy to use? Many use adsense, so I expect that to be recommended. However, what about other sources of revenue in addition to Adsense?
• What is the optimal way of placing these ads on a page? Top in the header, just above the content, below the content, in the right vertical bar?
• What is the optimal look of these ads? Contrasting colors to stand out and draw attention? Blended in to look natural on the site?
  
  Any help is greatly appreciated and used suggestions will receive credit on the parttimeseo.com site.

 

For me including them in the main text same color same style works. AND I found that a 468x60 textbanner bottom worked well.