You need to attract a lot of traffic to earn any significant money, this generally required a dedicated effort writing perhaps a couple of original quality 500+ word articles a week. Being a gifted writer is helpful, selecting a subject you have a passion for improves the chance of maintaining the motivation to maintain the required effort. A certain amount of search engine optimization (SEO) including getting links from other sites is also needed.
To see any revenue from Google;'s Adsense ad system a site typically has to get tens of thousands of visitors to earn the min $100 payout.
Having a product/service in mind that you want to sell would be good. Also having the tools and resources necessary to make your blog as profitable as possible would help.
http://www.patuniverse.com/utility-belt/
You can blog for others to earn money, this is called guest posting and depending on how you go about it, you can earn tons per article if you a good writer.