I think you are already on the right track, you don’t like sites that are littered with banners and adsense so what you need to realize is that neither do your site visitors. You need to add quality content to the site which in effect is going to help that person solve there problem you can then use text links to recommended products and even have a banner that is relevant to that content.

You just have to be careful not to over do it and make sure you are recommending products that really work so you end up with returning customers rather than angry ones.

What you need to do is pick one thing and stick to it, do not get to caught up in all the different strategies that are all over the internet right now you will only get more confused and have a lot more down time trying to read it all to stay up with all the latest trends.

Find a topic you like, set up a website with a suitable domain name add some quality content about 10 pages to start and then use article marketing to get it listed well so you can start seeing some traffic. Once you do that add more content to the site or even start a second site but make sure whatever you do is manageable and is not going to keep you in front of your computer for 16 hours a day seven days a week.