Advice for a newbie with tech blog

Hi everyone!

First of all, I would like to thank all of you, as I find the BHW an amazing place. This is my first post and I'm happy to join the community!
I need a few advices from you guys, as I'm a complete newbie in SEO world.

I own a website. It's a tech blog about C++, Java, Scala, Algorithms, Machine Learning and so on (i.e. not just a regular jQuery/PHP blog). All the content is very unique. I do not do any SEO. At all. I just publish articles. A few articles per week.

I started this project in April, 2014. The traffic is not consistent, because some articles are more or less popular.

Example:

[TABLE="class: grid, width: 500"]
[TR]
[TD]Date[/TD]
[TD]Unique Visitors / month[/TD]
[TD]Page Views / month[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]10Sep-Today[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]12,000[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]24,000[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]10Aug-10Sep[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]21,000[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]40,000[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]10Jul-10Aug[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]5,000[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]13,000[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]10Jun-10Jul[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]75,000[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]150,000[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]

Most of it is a US traffic (70-80%). As you can see, traffic is very jumpy. That's all because some articles go viral and some others don't. I may publish an article and it can get 10,000 views in a day and the other article will only get 500-1000 views. So Google Analytics graphs are usually like that:



I don't have a lot of returning visitors. Once I publish an article, I manually promote it through some channels(social networks, Twitter, etc.) and that's it.
Those spikes on a graph is when an article goes "viral".

The website doesn't have any ad right now. I'm trying to build a brand, so I'm very careful. The web site itself is much more than just a blog. Users can create an account there to do some cool things. The conversion rate is very small. Since April, I only have 300 sign ups, which is very low according to UVs and PVs.

But anyway, I'm thinking to try to make some $$$ out of it. What are your thoughts? The most stupid question is: "How much I can make from it?". Does it make sense to use AdSense?

As long as website's design is very minimalistic, I though to try to put a banner in a middle of every articles' text. The ad would also have to be Tech related. Maybe something about Cloud Computation Services, Database Management Services or Web Hosting. Definitely not about Medicine or Dogs

Any help is greatly appreciated!
I was reading the forum for some time, but after all decided to create an account and join the community.

I would suggest you to try adsense on your site and don't worry google will show ads related to your Content only...

Usually i have seen Cloud services, DB and web Hostings have pretty high CPC so go for it and see how it goes.

US traffic is a plus point.

you can also block certain adsene categories to make sure the ads on your site are related

do you capture emails?

you can have some affilate links for cloud storage, webspace etc wordpress themes stuff like that

have a list of top10 cloud service e.g

This site was born for adsense and some judicious product placements with that kind of traffic.

I do capture e-mails, but as I said, I only have 300 users right now. I don't want to spam them with ad. At least for now.
My niche is very engineering - scientists, top-notch software engineers, company owners, designers, etc. Very smart community.
My Twitter account has only 800 followers, but some of them are pretty talented people, like engineers from Spotify, LinkedIn, etc.

I'm also an engineer and work for one of the biggest IT companies (which goes next to Google and Yahoo), so I kinda understand my niche/community.

But thanks for your idea. I should certainly write it down and use when I have more users.