What About Link Exchanges?
August 3, 2008
Link exchanges are different from other ways of promoting your website that you may have already tried. Whether you’re a beginner with your first online business, or an experienced marketer, if you haven’t tried link exchanges, you might be missing out on something. These exchanges are a blend between traffic exchanges and affiliate marketing programs. The methods to use them and how they work are a bit different.
A link exchange offers you the chance to share your links with other sites, and in return they get to place their links on your site creating a mutual exchange. Some new opportunities exist that allow you to do this through an exchange site, but most of the time you will have to contact target sites directly and ask the site’s webmaster for an exchange of links to be done. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. Try both and see which best fits your needs.
By using an link exchange program, it can be faster than manually inviting webmasters to a link exchange offer. There are many types of link exchanges, so read up on the benefits of each one. You can set the parameters of the types of exchanges you want so your exchanges are more targeted and appropriate to your web content. The more link exchanges you get, the more visibility, which translates to more traffic, and more sales bottom line.
There’s a few things to consider before going into link exchanges. Most of the time there is start up work involved to set up the process, from contacting webmasters that you’d like to exchange links with, to being able to monitor the effectiveness of those exchanges. There are many valuable tools out there available to help with this process. It’s important that you find exchanges that are quality and not just wasting both time and space. Getting link exchanges can be effective, but you need to make it count.
Another important fact is that you want targeted link exchanges relating to your website niche. For example if your website is about business, you wouldn’t want a link exchange about hair styles (unless that business is related uniquely to that market). You would want topics that are about business and interesting to business owners. Search engines tend to view these unrelated type of links unfavorably. You would want to try to link with sites that have higher page rankings than your site to boost your site’s page rank. Not always easy to do, but not impossible either.
Sometimes there are great free directories that you can list your website in as well to provide one way links. One major goal of link exchanges is to boost your search engine ranking.
Some people feel like link exchanges hurt their businesses by taking their visitors away from their site to a partners site before making a purchase from you. While this can be true, there’s another side to this. The increased page ranks you gain from having link exchanges helps to offset possible loss of sales, plus you will also gain visitors to your site from those exchanges as well, so it works both ways.
Many web owners have found great success with link exchanges and would not do without them. Again, it will be up to you to decide whether this system will be advantageous to your business or not, and if it will be worth it once you’ve got it up and running. Give it a few months however to test the results because they do not come overnight.
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