Congrats man I'm finally starting to get some hits from Google. My site is on the first page of google for many different keywords now. I don't know what happened but I've been seeing more and more organic traffic. All I have to say is that the All In One SEO plugin for wordpress is amazing.
in my opinion regular visitors are less likely to click on an adsense or affiliate ad because they already know about the site/blog and what it has to offer its mostly the new visitors who's eye could catch up on an ad they feel interested about to click. Regarding to pagerank its good to have but its just one of the many factors that google uses to rank a website.
Yes totallly agree there, but keeping your content frequently updated and good SERP's will always attract new visitors to your site.
I think it all lies in the traffic management of your blog along with niche content that is unique original and engaging! You require to figure out high paying keywords! Many of my clients hire me to write for them so that they could earn money from Adsense! And they pay like cool money for writing the articles! Earning money from Adsense works only for those who know to do keyword research, hire prolific writers and perform SEO well enough to be found in the search engines within the top ten of their keyword phrases! Also, if you could plan out topics that would send you right at the top of Google, MSN and Yahoo! You would have done half your job well enough and the other half would be to hire someone who would be as great as a copywriter to write the articles pretty enough to rank higher anywhere on the internet! Most importantly it is the content that has to be engaging in order to inspire the reader to vote for the same!