Hi I wanted to share my little success I have an affiliate site selling fountains. It wasnt making any money, even though I've sent so many visitors to a merchant. Not sure if its bad pre-selling or bad prices, but I decided to remove all links to the merchant, now there is only little content and Adsense ads.( I removed all products and descriptions that wasnt unique anyway) Next day I've made $1.6! Since then this site makes $1/day on average and I didnt really start backlinks building yet! And I can tell you that I get pretty good CTR! Cant tell you exact number according to TOS, but here is how my page looks like right now. So... If your affiliate site doesnt make money - switch to Adsense! I'm glad I did Now I'm gonna start working on link building to increase traffic and revenue! Any comments, questions, feel free to post or pm me.
You are right, for low traffic site, affiliate earning is not good unless you are driving traffic from PPC. Most of the traffic will be accidental visitors and they will leave the site by clicking on an interesting ad. AdSense will pay you but affiliate merchant is not going to pay you unless there is a sale. Check out your bounce rate, I am pretty sure it is high