Good advices, but I don't like your thinking about the thing that you must blog for long time before you prove that you are fine at it to put advertisements and start earning money. I prefer putting advertisements since the beginning, because even the small earnings keep the blogger motivated and seeing that those small earning gradually increase, makes a good pleasant feeling to the blogger that he is doing good and keeps him even more motivated. That's of course only my view.
Thanks for sharing *but* ... get a domain man. Domain name: cheap. Hosting: cheap. Owning your brand & location: priceless. As for the adsense trickle... I think that apart from some of the big sites we hear about adsense IS a trickle. If you do things white, no blackhat stuff, then you have a couple of adsense sites which give a few bucks per day. tops. That's why you hear a lot of people saying it is better to gamble on selling something. One 20 dollar ebook every 400 visitors is more than 400 visitors with a 10% CTR on penny ads....