im totally agree with you, unique content is the main key. and thats good for a start. others: like SEO, ads placement, traffic and link exchange can come later
The only problem is you have no idea what they earn in revenues and what other channels they market themselves in. While you may be winning the SERP war their conversion to sales / lead could be 50% higher than yours so they do not need as many click throughs to make more money... Also for many large companies, Organic SERPs drive traffic, but few sales, since most people who use the free SERPs are those seeking to learn but have no purchase intent.
godmode truly appreciate your one man show Spirit Buddy keep that going My point of saying was all together different then what you understood there, when i started my career i was also one man GANG and today after 6 years i have team of 18 SEO experts which also includes quality content writers, when they write content it will give you feel that you are on TOP of this world and can achive anything and everything you want from adsense. May be very few people here will have quality content on their website, but if you will ask people with quality content on the website will answer your question that along one cant achieve what is being achieved by a team. with such a rich content Monthly if you wish to achieve 25k with approx 5 websites..its just a matter of may be 3 months. I hope that will answer your query about one man TEAM.....Cheera Regards Nandan
Sure unique content is great BUT, in my opinion you need to focus on a niche where visitors are actively seeking something that your Adsense can provide. If your users are just browsing for information then they are usually no good at clicking on ads. I have sites where the commercial intent is clear and the CTRs on these sites are huge and with just a small amount of traffic I can make decent $$