I have no idea where to start, though I have heard the revenue can be very good. I can write unique articles every day, but I have many questions about making a blog site. How much revenue can one make from just a startup blog? What themes and ad placements are good for adsense? What can i do to get hits(digg)? How long does it usually take to make good revenue? How can I add automated posts(rss) etc.
1. Not Much in the beginning. I am not skeptical but let me tell you, adsense is not a get rich quick scheme. What kind of earnings you are looking for ? I will advice you do to some proper reasearch before setting up a bloc. Choose a niche topic of your favourite topic and than write. Also promote it well. In 3 months when there is a PR update, you can also sell links on DP as well as showing ads of TextLinkAds. How much you can earn depends on traffic. DO NOT make over ambitious plans like writing one unique article for 3 months will start making you thousands of dollars a month. 2. If it's a blog, DO NOT worry about it right now. Just stick to content and traffic. You can use a ladderboard on left or right hand side and a 468x60 at the top of blog. But don't think about stuch things if you even have not thought about on what topic you are going to write. 3. Forget about Digg and Do not waste you time in thinking how you can get digg. It's fool's gold. If you get digged, awesome otherwise screw them 4. It depends. I will advice you to NOT to think about revenue but to think about visitors. First write good articles than put a target of 100 visitors for first month than increase to 300 for second month and probably by 4 month you can make it by 1000 visitors. Ofcourse this is easier saying than done. With 3 clicks for 100 visitors and each click giving you $.33, you can make $10/day with 1000 visitors. It's a rough eastimate and it can be alot higher. Best Of Luck
Posiedon has given good suggestion, I think it depends on the subject you are going to start with and the amount of traffic you can generate overtime. You need to work from the ground level from blog optimization and so on promotion to your targeted field, so one can not predict how much revenues you can generate before just the launching.
A blog is no different to a site in that i takes time to earn anything decent because it takes time to build traffic. I think a blog will generally have a lower CTR because of the nature of having a lot more returning traffic who get used to the ads.
Digg is only good if A LOT of people vote for your site. If you don't have A LOT of traffic then you won't get any traffic from Digg.
IT will take time and you will learn the answers yourself by time. I think learning all these yourself is the best way to go. With these experience you will learn to do much better things. And in fact, i think, all webmasters here have different experiences and do your plans differently. This is what will make some of us successfull and others at least not successfull as much as others. So i suggest you to look at this as a learning experiment and plan to earn money after 6 months or more... Else you can be disappointed much..
Digg is OK but the traffic is very hard to convert into money. Digg users are notoriously "skim and go" type surfers who are flicking through the top Dugg sites very quickly. I'd rather get mentioned on a larger related blog - visitors that come from a source like that are much more likely to be converted to regular readers.
I tell friends and associates who talk about building their own website to create a blog first at Google's Blogger site. I tell then to write posts everyday. Once they have 20-30 posts they should have enough quality content for a 5 page website.
Yes, try to generate traffic and frame a good reader base, you can even run other contextual ads alongwith adsense now and also some of the affilliate program.
Blog about something you really enjoy. A hobby, interest, etc. You will grow tired of blogging if your heart is not in it.
It depends on your platform of choice but if you are using Wordpress you can browse their theme gallery for one you like. Or even Google "WordPress themes" and you will find tons. I have found that the Adsense heat map works well for blogs too.