It's all about the contents and SEO. But the contents are the key for long term success. Many of us try to take shortcuts and try to copywrite articles, copy articles, or do auto blogging. These are not the ways to make money. This will take some (not much) initial investment Best way in my opinion 1) Buy a domain 2) Buy a hosting that can support wordpress 3) Install wordpress 4) Buy a nice theme 5) Give yourself a year and start writing/blogging about what you're good at. 6) Install wordpress plugins that help with SEO 7) Put adsense or other ads of your choice Watch your traffic slowly grow over time as long as you keep updating the contents. Slow, but steady -> eventually successful.
Some things you forgot to mention - Add high quality unique content to the website in the form of affiliate/product reviews + pay for SEO services to lift your website's ranking on the search engines.
There are lots of hackers out there. They always try to put spam links on wordpress blogs/websites. If you can't handle the pressure to recover your site from the hack then all your efforts could go in drain. Moreover, there are competitors in all niche. So I think it's not that simple. How much you can expect from adsense?
Making money with adsense is not that simple as we think. Today most of the browsers use ad blocks as well.
Adsense is not such a great option anymore. I have used them 10 years ago and, with less traffic than what I have now, it brought more revenue. I do agree on the blogging tips though, find a good niche and blog. You do need to make a constant effort and network a lot, but there's money to be made.
Just doing that will not bring in enough traffic. I have a blog with content but no backlinks and this is the sixth month. It receives just between 51 and 60 visits a day.So another vital point is building backlinks especially from .edu blogs