Does your host have some kind of website building tools? What are you going to use to create your pages? Or are you going to code your pages from scratch? For example I use Dreamweaver.
Before you can apply for AdSense or any affiliate program you need your site up and running with a decent amount of content.
Second, I'm a little concerned about the goal of your site and your content. I understand you want to make money in the long run but your immediate focus should not be to get advertisers. You need targeted traffic in order for your site to appeal to advertisers. So your first goal should be to decide on a theme for your site. What keywords are you going to target? Who is your audience? Then build your content around that topic.
Go to sites like
www.selfpromotion.com and learn about page optimization for the search engines and then once you have traffic you can start joining more affiliate programs like Amazon.com to monetize the traffic.
Don't worry so much about advertisers and making money yet. You need to build your site and generate good amounts of content on whatever theme you are planning to go after.
So first things first, sounds like you need to decide what method you are going to use to build your site. Software? Code from scratch? Your web host's tools? (if any)