Here’s another way to monetize your site: Sell advertising on it. The easiest way to do that is to put Adsense on it. It won’t be a landslide, but you might make $100/mo. from it.
Once you see the kind of advertisers you’re getting, you can try to sell adspace directly to that type of advertiser for 2 to 5 times what you were getting per month from Adsense.
All the while, you can keep building your site, add a weekly or monthly email newsletter (to be able to keep promoting your site to visitors even after they’ve already left), add a forum (to make the site more compelling, to keep people coming back to increase pageviews, etc.).
Years ago I created a bunch of sites for fun and as a public service. I tried to make them as useful as I could but never saw how I could make any money from them. Now I’m selling ads on them and making enough to live on from that without even counting my other income. If you have a passion for your site, put that passion into your site and I think the rewards can follow. Plus, you’ll feel so good knowing that your site is valuable and that it’s *worth* something when you have both a lot of visitors and advertisers wanting to pay to have their ads on it. It’s a lot better feeling than hoping you’ll get a few sales through some affiliate program.
Good luck, -MBJ-
P.S. If you can find the *right* affiliate program to match your content, it might make more for you than advertising.