Over half a year into Google's AMP movement, I finally decided to give it a try. Using one of my own websites on a slow server (but with interesting content), my goal was to see if I could amp up my site to be found on Google, mostly because of the faster load times provided by the pages being hosted remotely. You may have other reasons for considering AMP, but this was one of mine, anyhow.
I used a plugin for the website CMS. Each kind of CMS likely has a plugin, and there are probably a few available. I am testing the free version before I go pro. So far, I've been able to accomplish quite a bit with the free version, with one major flaw (I can't use the Facebook Like/Comments plugin). However, I can always add Facebook comments back in later if my AMPed up website doesn't help me get new readers.
A few items of concern that you'll need to address if looking to use the AMP pages:
1. Images. Google is strict when it comes to your logo, and you need to have one. Follow the rules, and it will only take an hour or so to get that part right. However, you also have to make sure your article images are the right size, and this could be a headache if you spent hours trying to make images smaller for mobile devices, only to find that Google wants pretty large widths in pixels. Validate, revalidate, and then template your way of getting it right. My images work fine if I resize them for documents in Office Picture Manager (hey, it works for this).
2. Make sure you have your CMS set to add an author and publishing date, and any other data Google will be looking for. I also stripped out the email and print icons, since they looked bad in mobile.
3. You can't give up on the rest of your website. Links will all go to the mobile version of your site, so creating AMP pages isn't really an option to make a non-mobile website suddenly mobile-friendly. It's more like using a CDN to host certain pages of the website and possibly get a boost in searches.
4. Add metadata if you have not before. I don't know if this does anything in AMP, but I saw it as a chance to add meta description and tags when I had neglected to do so before. That alone might help searches finding my content, but it's an opportunity to amp up your pages in a couple of ways at one time as you submit the pages to Google.
5. Have Google crawl your website. My sitemap does not seem to automatically recognize AMP pages, and I don't care if Google sees the ones that I'm not amping up for the searches. However, I am submitting AMP pages I want to get seen. And I'm doing it with the mobile setting instead of desktop without any indication it helps in any way.
6. Adsense works on AMP pages if you embed it in the head of the AMP template. Or purchase the pro version of your AMP plugin. I chose the cheaper for now because I want to see if the new pages make any kind of a difference.
7. If all of this is way over your head, then contact Passive Ninja to see if you need AMP pages. I'm not sure if anyone does as I write this, but if I start to see results, you can bet I'll add it to the list of things I can do for clients. If I don't see results, I won't push you to spend the money.
Here are the comparisons of two pages. Best viewed on mobile, but you can see both on a desktop.