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I kept receiving the emails from Amazon warning me they were changing their affiliate system and that if I still wanted to be credited with any sales, I needed to change my links.

Everytime I got the email I had better things to do. I haven’t used an Amazon link for ages. Its one of those programs that you join when you first start out but you soon realize there are products out there that pay a lot more than the 2% or so that you get for a sale through Amazon.

I only get the odd sale so I decided I could better use my time on doing things that were a bit more productive, ie. making money. That was until my Adsense took a nose dive. A bit of investigating revealed all my old Niches In A Box sites that were monetized with Amazon had simply stopped working and all that was shown to a visitor was a fatal php error.

I’ve been at it all weekend but finally got them all back online but what a nightmare. I don’t know if you are familiar with the Niches In A Box system but basically I had to log into each seperate silo (each site has 12) with an ftp client and change the permissions for the config file, then log in to the control panel for each silo and switch off the Monetize with Amazon option, log out and then use the ftp client to change permissions back.

Not hard work but brain numbingly boring although it did give me the excuse to visit some of these sites for the first time in many months. Most haven’t been touched for around a year and it was a suprise to me how far I had come since I put those sites up. If I was putting them now there would be several things I would be doing different to optimize them and I did change quite a few of them while I was logged in to them with the ftp client.

I added the ”nofollow” command to the links in the footers that pointed to the TOS and Privacy pages and I changed the link text for the home page from “Home” to “main site keyword.” Pretty basic stuff but obviously stuff I wasn’t aware of less than a year a go when I was throwing these sites up.

It also made me realize that I kind of do the maintenance of my old sites the wrong way around. I haven’t touched my old Niches In A Box sites simply because they were ticking along nicely making me money. They do really well via Adsense but they also sell the odd ebook as well. Sites and blogs that struggle to get any traffic and therefore don’t make any money, tend to get more of my time as I try to figure out why they aren’t performing.

I should play the numbers game and realize sometimes you just pick a bad subject. If you put 2 sites up and one starts getting plenty of traffic and one doesn’t, it would make sense to give your time to improving the proven winner rather than trying to get something out of the loser.

So I am going to do a bit of promotion work on these older sites that are making me money and see how far they can go…..If I can find the time!