I have used monolingual decks with great results for the past 6+ months, so I thought I would share how I use them. I hope it’s of use ;)
As Khatz has mentioned a million times, monolingual decks are a great way to study languages. One of the many benefits is that you can’t study material more advanced than your current level, since you won’t be able to understand the definitions for words. When learning monolingual you will quickly start to realize that the English-Japanese dictionaries out there are flawed in many ways when it comes to definitions, which is another reason why monolingual is awesome. When making the cards you will be using a lot of your current knowledge to understand the grammar and words used in definitions, which will make for a more interactive study environment, where you know a word’s meaning pretty well once you click add. You should expect a lower success rate on cards due to the cards being much harder than the bilingual cards.

At first it might seem daunting to start a monolingual deck, but actually it’s pretty easy. First of all you need to find a good dictionary. How complicated the definition depending on the dictionary you chose. As a beginner you will probably want to go with something aimed at kids, teenagers etc..
Personally I use these two. Sanseido is great for simple definitions, but as I am getting better I am using goo a lot more. There are a lot of great dictionaries out there, so you should by no means limit yourself to using these two, it’s just my personal favorites.
http://www.sanseido.net/
http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/

As suggested by Khatz(you can read more about monolingual decks over on his site) the first thing you should do to get comfortable with J-J dictionaries is to look up words you already know and add them to your deck. Once you are comfortable using the monolingual dictionary you can start adding your own words.
Sometimes the definitions might have new words or new grammar. If that’s the case you can look up the grammar and the words you don’t understand. This will make you learn a lot from just adding words to anki, and 1 word can branch off to 10+ words if definitions keep having words you haven’t seen. If there are too many new words, or you don’t want to learn the words used in the definition just go ahead and add the word to a bilingual deck. I still do this with maybe 1/4 of words I want to add ^^

The layout I use is
Definition -> word
word -> definition

But that can of course be changed depending on your preferences. I recommend getting Japanese support, which will allow you to automatically add furigana to your card(can’t be used in question field). I also recommend tagaini jisho which is a great offline dictionary that can also be used to show stroke order, JLPT level etc.. If you have the sentence where you saw the word and decided to add it, that’s probably the best example sentence to use. If you didn’t write it down, I suggest using google, alc or denshi.

This is my setup

Card examples (sorry ’bout different text sizes, I just used some I already had uploaded)