Everything starts with a goal and a plan on how to reach it. You must have a plan to get web site traffic, and not just hope you make money, but make the plan to Earn from Adsense the income goal you desire.

Above is a simple 'traffic / revenue' plan. The webmaster desires to produce $3,000 / month of income. As such, she follows the simple formula of Earnings = Traffic x Click Through Rate x Revenue Per Ad.

Most sites see a click through rate of 2%, but that number will increase or decrease with the "Relevance" (ability provide solutions to users for the topic they seek). The more relevant the internet ads on a site are to the sites content, the higher the click through rate. Keywords and site content generate the ad content, and that ad content needs to be making Google want to serve ads on your site which create the highest Google Adsense Revenue.

The Webmaster that developed this plan is creating strategy (based on revenue of $3,000 / month) which simply states that

1. Her site will be based on pay per click keywords which will serve ads with a revenue expectation of $8/ click or more - quite high! 
2. The Adsense Revenue plan will optimize the site (see related articles)  to serve internet ads that correspond the 'earnings per click plan'.    
3. She will target a click through rate of 4% (demands high relevance), and to accomplish that she will need to get web site traffic of 313 unique visitors to the site each day and ensure the ads she serves are highly relevant to her content. 
4. She will track and deselect ads in the AdSense Interface which distract from relevance and (if possible) from her desired average of $8/click.
   

Bear this in mind - there are 175,000 new blogging sites that come online daily. How many of those have any plan? At most 1%. It is not enough to say "I want plenty of money". There must be a plan on how to produce AdSense Revenue. You may find that (after research) the sites main topic or keyword has approximately 20 searches per day, and the associated keywords in Adsense average 5 cents per click. Is this a topic that you want to put all your free time into? Likely not if you value your time and want to make $1000 / month.

To make money online, the webmaster needs to know a) the traffic is out there b) the ad revenue is there c) develop a plan to get there. In this case, the webmaster is optimizing her site for a topic that she knows 308 visitors is doable, and so is the earnings per click goal of $8 / click.  From here she can move forward and make a more specific plan on how to "get web site traffic", "get the click through rate", and "get Asense Pay" she desires.