I have a niche blog and make about $100 per month with Amazon affiliate program and get about 3, 000 visitors per month. I just implemented the CPM ads, but normally I use the Native Ads in Custom mode to link specific products to my articles. I also use text links in the content, optimize my images for keywords and also use an affiliate link in the image. I notice that a lot of my traffic comes from Google images so people should always optimize images.
My biggest challenge is just keeping up with writing articles. It’s easy to get burned out. Yet, because I’ve continued to write monthly I have seen my income grow from $321 in year one to more than double that in the first 5 months of 2016.