Link Exchanges

Link exchanges are different from other forms of marketing you've done up to this point. Whether you're just getting into your first online business, of if you've been doing this for some time, if you haven't gotten into link exchanges, you might be missing out on a great marketing enhancement. These exchanges are something of a cross between traffic exchanges and affiliate marketing programs. However, the way you get into them and how they work are a bit different.

To begin with, a link exchange offers you the opportunity to share your links with other sites, and in trade you place their links on your site. There are some new opportunities arising that allow you to do this through an exchange site, but most of the time you will have to contact target sites directly and request to the site's webmaster that an exchange be entered into between your site and theirs. With the sites I mentioned, you can avoid most of this e-mail hassle and simply register your site as one willing to enter into a link exchange.

The benefit to being a member of a link exchange is that you are sharing traffic with other sites who are, by your selection, going to give you targeted traffic appropriate to the goals of your business. Furthermore, the more exchange partners you accumulate, the better visibility you have for your site. And, as you know already, more visibility means more traffic, and more traffic means higher earnings.

It is important that you are aware of a couple of things about link exchanges. The first is that these will often require you to do a lot of start-up work, contacting webmasters and setting the whole thing up. Beyond that, you have to be able to monitor the effectiveness of each link you place. You don't want to have a bunch of links out there doing nothing for your business. So getting into link exchanges and maintaining them can be a good thing, but you will have to decide whether the work is worth the reward.

One final note about link exchanges. There are some who have argued that these agreements actually take traffic away from your site by encouraging visitors to click a link before they buy anything from you. While this may be true in some cases, it is not the standard. Many webmasters have found success with link exchanges and would not do without them. So, here again, it will be up to you to decide whether this system will be a benefit to your business, and it will be up to you as well to decide whether it's working once you've gotten into it.