One of the best ways to generate money from writing from my experience, is write, but offer something else in the mean time.

An example would be a freelancer who designs websites. Everytime he posts his portfolio up for a job, he's also posting his blog up. Potential clients that are interested in working for him come to his site, which is also a blog. They look through a couple articles to deem if they want to hire you, and thus you have a free reader. After doing this for a while, advertising yourself as a designer and writing your own content you thus generate traffic, revenue (from adsense as well as design work), and you have content. This then triggers your SEO aspect and generates pagerank.

You now have a successful blog.