My experience after many years of running blogs is that I can't match my traffic to sponsors as well as sponsors can match their sites to mine. Which is a fancy way of saying, I try to have a little bit of brokered ad space on all my blogs, and it usually generates more revenue than any affiliate ads I try in the same space.
Right now, the ad brokerage that's working for me is
JuicyAds. You need a clean network to work with; blog surfers won't put up with endless ads for fake penis pills and dating networks full of fake profiles.
This is the only way to pull in advertisers like my latest on my fetish blogs: a little hand-made bondage leather goods outfit whose sales page is, I shit you not, a seller page on Etsy.