Using WordPress you can have many benefits. Hire an experienced WP coder and try to customize your blog with quality plugins and after, write quality content, 1-3 articles everyday. If you don't have time, hire someone, use freelance websites to hire. To use adsense, you need to find a good place to insert, just don't abuse, your visitors will leave your blog after few seconds if they are bumped with ads. Use it as you are a visitor to your own blog and you want to see quality content and quality ads, no AD SPAM. Good luck! P.S. I run my own network of blogs and it's going well, just take one or two hours daily to post some quality content. Blogs are Google search bots love!
Of course it is quite possible to earn money through wordpress.... look at john and problogger... doh!
I agree that Blogs are a useful source of traffic, but not everyone will be able to harness that traffic to make any decent cash out of it. There are exceptions, of course, but the vast majority will not make the money they expected. I would much rather see someone blogging about something in such a way as to complement an existing business, or suchlike.