@Gareth C Thomas: Hiya, generally speaking each product has a separate affiliate page and process, but most of them work if you add your PayPal email to the end of the URL.

So for instance WP Affiliate Pages would be

http://www.wpaffiliatepages.com/?e=YourPayPalEmailAddress

As another example If you sign up on the affiliate page here:-

http://www.wpaffiliatepages.com/affiliates/

You'll get all the details emailed to you, plus a link to another page with the details on it. I'll be doing the same kind of thing for this plugin.

-Frank

@S: Thanks for that. Yes I moderate everything here, and the very few negative or off topic comments I get, I deal with outside this blog.

Negativity doesn't really help anyone so I try to keep things positive in all aspects of my life, although I do find myself blowing off steam every so often, I don't ever think it's a productive thing to do as life just isn't perfect and we have to try to make things better.

-Frank

@CJ from Article Writing News: Love your blog.

You know what? For the niche blogs built using autoblogging methods, I just don't worry about it. It's a case of getting them up and built and moving on. I use quite a few useful little plugins to do various things, and I'll share as many of them as I can think of in the short report.

The links in an article usually come in the resources box at the bottom of the article itself, and something I've been looking for is a simple method of inserting an ad right before the resource box that then draws attention away from it.

In the meantime, there's a plugin I use that auto inserts a block at the top of a page right before the article starts.

http://richardkmiller.com/wordpress-plugin-what-would-seth-godin-do

The idea behind that plugin is to display an ad to first time vistors, and then hide it for regulars. It does that by dropping a cookie, and after 5 visits or so, either your visitors no longer get an ad, or they get a different ad – you can configure it either way. You can also set it to be on posts only or on pages and posts, so it's fairly flexible.

There must be similar plugins knocking around, and I guess it's only a matter of time before I find another one to complement it.

So when people land on your niche site, right at the top of the landing page post there's your ad.

Of course it would be nicer if it either rotated or randomly selected one of a list of ads, and I'm currently investigating a workround to see if I can get it to do something like that. It might be possible to use it in conjunction with the free OpenX Ad Server but it could also be far more trouble than it's worth, so we'll see.

Alternatively you could of course use AdSpurt to display keyword driven hover ads. This is less a intrusive method of ad serving, and so as a result may not give as good a result as we'd want it to.

Testing and time will tell.

-Frank

@Elise: I shouldn't have said that. I remember when I wrote it having slight misgivings and ignoring them. Don't worry about being de-indexed, the chances are very slim.

De-indexing will happen if you link to "bad neighbourhoods", make it obvious you're selling advertising (a bit two-faced of Google I know), or you're unlucky enough to end up on a shared server with other sites that have been de-indexed, such as adult sites. As I said, chances are slim, but it does happen.

However, you should take care with ping-spamming the global update servers as they *will* ignore you. When that happens, Google may stop visiting so often, but it's usually not terminal.

As Ade Martin pointed out, the issue of ping-spamming by WordPress is supposed to be fixed, but I wouldn't take any chances on this when it's so easy to install and activate Smart Update Pinger.

Better safe than sorry, but not something you should overly worry about, just be aware of it.

BTW, I use Smart Update Pinger to turn off all pinging until my site is ready, so it tends to be the first plugin I install and activate. When I'm fiddling about with a new site, the last thing I want is the search engines visiting before I'm ready for them.

-Frank