Adsense is very simple to setup, but there's so much more you can do with it. There's ways to improve CTR (clickthroughs), optimising pages as well as rules to stop getting banned. Shoemoney is a millionaire and understands how it works and provides the tips below.
Shoemoney Money
I reviewed Shoe Money a while back, he started off making 1 dollar a day until 6 months later he was making huge amounts. The questions and answers seem to expand outside of Adsense, but is still useful in relation to building a site.
Don't let one adsense account make too much money.
Setup separate corporate entities and get different bank accounts/ein for each. It's much safer to have 10 corporate entities bringing in 10k each/month then 1 bringing in 100k. All someone has to do is complain about copyright or whatever or any of the other horror stories we have heard about getting shutoff from adsense and boom your whole business is out. Setup multiple corporate entities and you will have safteynets. I get a new P.O box for each company then have them all forward to our main office.
Site Profits
Take current profits from last month and multiply by 40. That should give you a good estimate of what a company is worth. If its worth it sell it.
Set goals and keep them.
When I first started with adsense my goal was to make 273.98 per day. I had it taped all over my house. It drove my wife and friends nuts. I had that number in my head and wouldn't stop until I started making at least that. Once I was averaging that per day for 60 days I doubled it and so on and so fourth. Never settle. I know allot of webmasters who made there goal and just idled.
Everyone is targeting high paying ads and building a site around it.
My business model has been to target high SEARCHED for phrases and then try to make the pay as much as possible with adsense. It's a very interesting game trying to balance keyword density for traffic and keyword density for profit.
Be patient.
There will be massive spikes with adsense but unless you have drastically changed your web page don't worry about it too much. This is an extremely volatile market we are making money in.
Banning Sites in Competition Filter
I have never ever banned sites on my page using the compeititon filter from google. If I feel they are not pulling good ads then I change the keyword density to pull better ones. I *think* that google will ALWAYS try to display the highest paying ads for your site for your keyword density. This is purely my theory and its just based on common sense.
Weekly Routine
1) Register at least 10 new domains (and have ideas for each domain)
2) Put up at least 1 new website. I call this part planting seeds.
Once a website gets over 1k uniq visitors a day I will put up subscriptions/donation/adsense/adbrite depending on what it is.
Domains
I have only had success for .com but that is all I register.
Niche vs Traffic
In my opinion traffic is the easy part. Its finding the niche or service that is the hard part.
Selling or Dropshipping
I try to dropship everything I can and not have inventory to manage but sometimes if the profit is there that is unavoidable. Most data cables can be bought for under 1$ and if you buy bulk you can literally get them for pennies (quantities of 1,000 or more). I usually make a 75% profit on physical goods including shipping, handling, and packaging.
Do you use your existing sites to generate traffic for your new sites?
Totally. I think its very important to stay with one vector and slowly branch out into related subjects.