Is traditional affiliate marketing with SEO still effective?

After the google panda update I keep reading that getting affiliate sites ranked is extremely hard now and not worth it anymore. How true is that? Are people still making good money with affiliate sites and traditional seo/backlinking methods? I know that social seo is more important now, like facebook and stuff. I also know that more people are searching on mobile devices, and eventually more searches will be done on mobile devices than on desktops (I heard this from watching an interview with Eric Schmidt on c-span)

Will the traditional model of building affiliate sites and getting them ranked be effective in 2012? Or should I try a different business model like selling mobile websites or something?

My goal is to earn $100 per day by the end of 2012, which I think is pretty achievable. I am just trying to decide on a business model to focus on and commit to. But I keep reading that affiliate marketing and SEO is pretty much dead.

I'm sure this has come up plenty of times on this forum, and I'm sorry for bringing it up again, but I just want some assurance that building affiliate sites and getting them ranked in google is still worth the effort. I built one site before and invested $70 on it, and it took about 3 months to get on page one, but it only makes about $3 per month with adsense, so I don't know if it is just that I picked the wrong keyword, or that the amount of time, money, an effort it takes to get ranked now isn't worth the payoff.