I’m in the same boat as Family CEO above – yep, I run a frugality blog. I have affiliate links to Amazon products I’ve reviewed – mostly books, but also slightly bigger ticket items like heated mattress pads – but as you can imagine, it’s hard to convince people to buy a book when in another article you talk about the merits of the public library

I’ve never used AdSense or other PPC services, for precisely the reason you mention – there are a lot of dubious or downright shady products that pop up based on those kinds of keywords, and I didn’t feel comfortable selling my reader’s mindshare for those types of products.

Luckily I never really started writing the site as a means of making money (I just wanted a more professional looking blog than my LJ for my more serious articles; and frugality and personal finance were especially relevant to me when I started it), so I’m not too disappointed.

But I feel like now that I understand blogging, marketing, and SEO a little bit better, I would like to write something that has the potential to be profitable. I’ve been playing around with the AdWords tool but haven’t happened on anything that meshes with my skills AND is terribly profitable yet. My skills are so varied, too, I wonder if I might do better going the writing articles for eHow route…

Oh, well, just my ramblings