I think that nothing can beat good content. No matter what you do on the on page optimizations on your web site, if you don’t have good quality content then your site will never have a top position in the SERP’s. Basically is very easy to verify that you have consistent content.
You can use Google adsense to advertise on your web site and make money from it but also to see if the links you are getting are representing the content. If not then you should try to re-write the article so the links to be more appropriate.
The thing that I’ve observed is that some articles are harder to be written in other language then english : web design articles for example – the reason is because you have to translate technical words – sometimes you can escape without translation sometimes you can’t. For me it’s easier to write in english.
Good content is usually about things that you know. It’s much more easy to write and answer to comments.