I only promote a few products that I think are the best option in terms of quality and price/earnings.
I chose to promote a few very select products and from their will change locations to see if I can improve results. You can see it here on my blog. I’ve had some reasonable results but will keep improving things. To see if I can improve earnings.
I make all the products (including older ones) available but strongly promote the products that fit-in with the various topics on my site (which really means several hundred products). Most of this is done by RSS feeds. If you'd like to create such RSS feeds for your own site then you can create them here: http://www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/make_rss_code.php (and, yes, this is run off my website)
Promoting all the products/malls/etc. (for me) has proven to be less effective than cherry picking and putting in all efforts to proven sellers. I do about 10, all convert, though I've tried 50+ easy by now... That learning curve is a bitch but something we all need to go through to understand how most effective products/campaigns work and why.
I agree, the mall approach is way too generic. Targeting traffic for specific products seems to work much better
i make about one site a day. PPC...and another method which i dont tell I will watch my earnings and probably write another ebook about that..hehe