It's hard to tell since we don't really know what your niche or target audience is. Your best bet would be to try it all. I would think that in general adsense would work out pretty well.
It totally depends on your website.. what kind of a website is it? a product review site? if that's the case then amazon affiliate program would be good. if it's just a general gossip/celeb blog... maybe adsense.
You can always try the free email submits for laptops and iphones for generic traffic, since everyone wants a free laptop.
Love what you said, and the best way to improve on this is ...
first run adwords, for about 2 or 3 weeks until the ad system learns what makes money for it's clients, then start paying attention what's being advertised. find correlating affiliate programs that would benifit from your users and design pages leading to those products-affiliate programs, this way you can maximize the revenue from it
look at it as a funnel, guild the visitor down the funnel to a vendor, then let them click to the vendor and the vendor can finish the sale.
on another similar note:
I use the sales funnel trick to guild visitors to pages that present the adsense advertiser ad's. think of the sales funnel as a qualifier of the visitor, the more they go down the funnel, the better they are to purchase something, and if you do it right, those qualified visitors buy what you sold them, and your click value will be increase a lot.
I bought a site recently, 200 UV and 1000 page loads daily ( all organic ), did some basic SEO to it, added about 20,000 words to it ( 50ish pages ) made it all funneling. now I have the same 200 UV and about 1100 page loads but my ctr went up to 9%ish ( from 3%ish ) my revenue went from .17 per click average to about .60ish.
