First, the best way to make money with your site - is to have a site that is actually worth something. Too many sites give away one template and then are suddenly covered with adsense ads. It is just dumb. If you really want to make money with a site you need to act like money isn't your goal.

Find something useful to people (like funny posts, GOOD reviews, free downloads, etc..) and then focus on that. Try to stop the greed bug from controlling your actions and you will soon have a site people actually like. Remember, there are 8,500,000,000 (rounded) other sites out there - why should anyone care about yours?

Second, Adsense is only for sites that don't have computer/web geeks visiting them. I am a graphic designer/PHP programmer and I bet I haven't clicked on a single adsense ad in over 2 years. I know what they are and I just skip over them. Like so many other people - my mind just ignores them.

So if Grandma, a CEO, or Joe construction worker is your site audience the adsense is great.

So, If you deal with web people then your ads actually need to cater to THEM. cssremix.com (example of ads) and smashingmagazine.com (example of content that makes it onto digg) are good examples of sites that use ads well for the webmaster community.