Newbie blog collaboration advice

Hi,

I want to get some advice. Here's the situation: I'm pretty much a newbie to internet marketing - I know a little about it but not that much. What I'm doing now is freelance writing - you know the kinda quickie stuff where you get 5 - 10 bucks for a page of writing. I'm good at, people are always telling me I'm one of their best writers, I get highly rated on freelancing sites, etc.

There this fellow I've been doing blogs for - he apparently has a whole slew of blogs. I send him blog posts at like 10 or 20 bucks a pop for like 7-1400 words. It's not too bad but its a bit of a time consuming way to make money.

This cat seems to be pretty good at getting things to rank. Just day before yesterday I sent him a blog post, and yesterday it was already right at the top of Google page 1.

I suggested the idea that we team up on a blog, and he's open to the idea. I'd come up with ongoing content and he'd set it up, get it ranking, etc. and we'd split the profits.

I just want some general advice about this. Is there some kind of agreement thing we should write up first?

other questions:

1. I'm thinking of making it a handyman/DIY blog - do you think that topic will do well financially with adsense ads?

2. These are the standard wordpress blogs he's got and he just slaps them together in no time. Is there some way I would get included as the administrator and be able to see what the profits actually were. I trust the guy to reasonable degree but I still would need to have actual access to the ad revenue figures. What would we do - get some kind of joint Google account we could both log into? (I guess that's where we'd see the profits, not on the blog) How would that work?

3. What's the best way to research which blog topics are doing the best?

any other advice also appreciated.

thanks,

Will