I've got pretty decent experience with various websites and shopping carts.  None of them ever had an ad.

Lately I have been considering making a few websites based on various topics and monetizing them.

Probably be on Wordpress platform. Curious if anyone has any tips and tricks, or where to look other than Adsense to get me started?

I'm not an expert on the subject, but I've worked on the technical side with a lot of people who do, or try to do, that for a living.  I've seen a huge range of results: some I've worked with are lucky to make ~$1000/year, and I've worked with a few who make >$1m/year. The vast majority make far less than a quarter of my salary (which is a comfortable living, but wouldn't particularly impress anyone here).

If you're not fully committed to doing the following consistently (read: every day), you will not see meaningful revenue:

Create high quality content
Network with others in the same industry/niche
Interpreting analytics, and adjusting your content strategy accordingly

If you're doing all those things, you'd be wise to consider other ways of generating revenue (affiliates, memberships, etc.) than just ads anyways.

ETA:  After posting this, I realized it's probably not that helpful, as it doesn't give you any actionable advice.  Here are a couple things:

Make sure your ads can be served asynchronously, and implement this: https://github.com/madgex/lazy-ads
If you do go with WordPress, you may end up hearing about the AdThrive and/or Grateful Digital.  Run away as fast as you can.  They're both fucking morons, and will do absolutely nothing good to your site.

The goal would be $1,000 a month.

Would I be better to buy an existing domain or start out at it? It has been my experience that it takes 3-5 years to get a website that is worth anything. I got the idea to monetize one from seeing what some monetized sites go for.

Honestly if that's what you're after, affiliate sales might be a better way to go, or at least an important piece of the puzzle.  

At any rate, I would generally agree with your assessment that it would take a few years to get that level of traffic to a new domain, but I'm really not an SEO expert.

Don't buy an existing domain unless you get a hell of a deal.

Search engines don't care as much about domain name anymore (that's a late 90's early 2000's thing)

You better have a good reason for people to go to your blog as apposed to YouTube.

$1000 a month is a HARD goal to reach and will take at a minimum 72 months spread across several websites serving different content that you will need to curate weekly at a minimum as well.

I own a site right now that gets 5,000 hits a month and generates ~$35-50 a month is basic google adsense ad revenue.

I would recommend looking into an Amazon Affiliate account and using those native ads so that you can make money from products purchased off of amazon. So far this year I have made over $100 a month just with that and it's outperforming ad views by far.

Then again I am not just doing it on my sites - I'm also doing it on social media through interest groups.

I would say for every 5,000 hits of unique traffic your website gets per month you will make $50 on average. It is VERY HARD to get over 5,000 hits a month unless you have a very popular and/or highly syndicated website/blog.

Sweet this is the kind of stuff I would like to know. Thanks for into on that affiliate stuff I will look into it.

On sites like Flippa, when people are saying $2k-$8k in revenues from all streams when they are trying to sell a site, are they pulling a stunt? I saw this and figured I could get a fraction of that revenue in a niche area.

Depends - I would make them specify revenue streams. There are big ones like google adsense and amazon affiliates which are directly placed ads on the website but there is also 'recommended ads' and such which appear below content on websites that are fed via plugins through other smaller ad networks. They could also own a social media account tied to that website and it's user base which gets money to advertise products in social media postings.

The websites could also be paying for inbound marketing in order to make that money through facebook and google ads or etc.

No one is selling a site for $2-8k because they forsee it making more money in the future. It's probably stagnant or needs lots of work or is a weird industry/niche.

Think of the real world example of people who buy businesses off of craigslist like lawn care companies and/or soda machine routes. Sure it makes money but to make MORE money and to recoup what you paid the previous owner it needs work and growth.

Niche areas can be hit or miss but the key is quality content and users these days for the most part can sniff out bullshit instantly especially in smaller industries. If you are not IN that niche and not a thought leader in that niche no one will listen to you or have a need to re-visit your website. This is mostly for written content or advice based websites, though.

Many websites that are magazines or blog-like in format post videos and pictures which people like to just pass the time and they tie it in with their social media accounts mentioned above.

Once a website gets large enough there is a hump it needs to get over and it's difficult (from experience) to do so. You will need to recruit people from your niche to help with the website and create content for you (for free hopefully) or you can syndicate content and cross-promote/post but that's an arena I haven't gone into yet.

The website that I own is currently stuck in the hump I mentioned above because of several factors but foremost because it's not my main hobby anymore - and I make almost six figures at my day job so I have no real incentive to put in the work needed to get to the next level.

Go be a YouTube personality and make dumb videos and vlog and all that jazz and monitize your channel. You will make money.