So first I wrote about how to make money from your blog but a lot of people wrote privately to ask me the secret to making money online using publishing/content as a tool.  Well, we have tried affiliate programs, ebooks, and Adsense and this is what we have learned (mind you this may not be universally true but is what happened to us)

1. There is nothing worse than affiliate programs.  You create great content, send people to someone else's website, and if they don't buy - you lose.  We have literally closed all our affiliate programs.
2. Selling ebooks is good when you write it and it is really useful to other.  But the book market is competitive - we never crossed four figures.  Finally, we have cut back on our marketing though we still carry them.
3. AdSense works and is 99% of our income right now.  But anyone who tells you that a robot developing websites for you by stealing content is going to make you rich assumes that the whole world is an idiot - it is not.  Yes, by having stolen but meaningless content (and very targeted ads) you can force some unsuspecting visitor into clicking but the reality is to create long term steady income, you have to provide useful information to people (that is what brings them back, and generates word of mouth).

So my advice is that you can make make as much as five/six figures a month with AdSense or similar ads but it is in most cases only by running high quality websites that people love.  By cheating the system, you might win short-term but if Google changes one line of code in its algorithm, your business would be wiped out overnight.