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AdSense and affiliate marketing are the two most common ways small sites turn traffic into money, but they reward very different things — which one suits your site first depends more on your content and audience than personal preference.
How AdSense works
AdSense places automated display ads on your pages and pays you per click or per thousand impressions, regardless of whether the visitor buys anything afterward. Income scales mainly with raw pageviews, so it suits high-traffic, broad-appeal content like news, entertainment, or general how-to guides.
How affiliate marketing works
Affiliate marketing pays a commission when a visitor clicks your link and completes a purchase (or sometimes just a sign-up) on the merchant's site. Income depends on buying intent rather than raw traffic — a small, focused audience actively looking to buy something can out-earn a much larger general audience.
Traffic requirements
AdSense generally needs volume to add up to meaningful income, since per-click payouts are often small. Affiliate income can start meaningful even with modest traffic, provided that traffic is specifically searching for the product or service you're linking to.
Effort and content type
AdSense fits naturally into almost any content without much extra work beyond placing ad units. Affiliate marketing usually needs more deliberate content — comparisons, reviews, buying guides — built specifically around products people are close to purchasing.
Income predictability
AdSense income tends to be steadier and more predictable once you have consistent traffic, since it doesn't depend on a visitor completing a purchase. Affiliate income can be more volatile — high some months, quiet others — but individual conversions often pay more than an equivalent number of ad clicks.
Using both together
Most successful small sites don't pick one exclusively — a review or comparison article can carry affiliate links for the specific products discussed while non-transactional pages elsewhere on the same site still run AdSense, capturing income from readers who aren't ready to buy.
Key takeaway: A high-traffic general blog usually does better starting with AdSense; a focused review or comparison site with clear buying-intent traffic usually earns more per visitor from affiliate links — many sites end up running both once they have enough content for each.