What is the best way to make money with affiliates on a website?

Have lots of traffic.
Show relevant ads.

Hope that helps!

Pick a niche area which does not have too much of competition. Use Google adwords tool to confirm if there are enough searches happening in the area. Also, this should be a niche where people are hungry for information and so ready to buy – for example, people looking for hair loss solutions are a hungrier bunch than say the people searching for different hair styles..

Once done, generate lots and lots of content on the same so you rank well on the search engines. And refer your visitors to related affiliate products from here..

@Vintage
Brilliant. Thanks

Build a standards compliant site, don’t make it ugly, focus 90% of your energy on content, join online groups that help you spread you message, and try not to obsess over the small stuff. There is so, so, so much to take into consideration when building a site/site traffic, but if you stay focused on giving your users what they want then your site will grow and eventually you can get really creative in your methods of building traffic.

Thanks doctor
Yes, I’ve definitely seen countless sites which are click rich and content poor and they drive me nuts. But I still imagine some are making money. I know that I basically never click on the first listings in google but scroll to find some real data rich sites for my topic. Hopefully I can offer something of substance and still make money. I just found a brilliant tool called MicroNiche finder for those interested in this type of thing. I have no affiliate with them.