Well, your first project should be a learning experience. Build a Wordpress blog, learn all of its features, and write a couple of articles for it. Read this fabulous forum for information about tags and keyword building, meta descriptions, ext...
Write at least 1 article a day for a month or 2. Practice writing articles so you include your keywords in there multiple times without spamming it, this will help you rank higher.
Use Alexa Boosters, autosurf sites and ext... to make your Alexa rank go up so you can get better G ads.
Write approximately 10 related articles and post them to sites like Articlebase, Goarticles, Ezine and similar with a link to an individual page and a link to your homepage in the author box. This will help establish you as an authority in your niche.
In each of your articles, link out to an authority site that will not affect your revenue: Such as Wikipedia. This will help build "Trust" in G's eyes.
Spam the hell out of the sites you submitted to other article sites with links (Use Scrapebox). Then do a little bit of manual link building to the individual pages of your site or minor blasting with Scrapebox if you are lazy. Remember to make your site look like it is white hat.
Do some Viral Marketing. Learn how to use twitter, facebook, myspace, ext... and get some friends and start getting your sites name out there. You can also upload some video's from youtube and in the description send them to your site for an article on it, review or something similar. (It is easy to steal other peoples youtube video's and upload them yourself - just search the forums)
These are the steps to a successful website. Just make a practice site, work on it for 2 months so you learn a lot, and forget it. That is what I did and now I have multiple successful websites.
Funny thing is that my original website is starting to make a little bit of money now, which is surprising since it is in a large, hard-to-profit, niche. The $10 a month from that site is much better to me than thousands I make with other sites.