Monday, August 11, 2008

Pros and Cons of Link Exchanges

By Shep Samson


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.

For starters a link exchange offers you the opportunity to share your links with other sites, and in exchange you place their links on your site. There are some new opportunities that allow you to do this through an exchange site, but most of the time you will have to contact target sites directly and make a request to the site's webmaster that an exchange be entered into between your site and theirs. There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. Try both and see which fits your needs best.

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.

It's important to find quality link exchanges and not just random junk. Trades that are generally totally unrelated to websites that have a poorer web rank than yours are not a good idea. The goal is to get link exchanges with sites that rank higher than yours (not always easy to do), and related to your site's content. For example if your site is about jewelry, you wouldn't want links about cars. Having quality links help improve both the quantity of visitors that would visit your site as being more targeted and better odds of buying your product, plus boosting your search engine rankings.

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.

There are some who say that these exchanges 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, it is not the standard. On the other side of the issue, the increased traffic from improved search engine rank that you may gain by doing quality link exchanges, most likely will offset any possible losses. You will also gain some visitors to your site that you wouldn't have gained otherwise, so most of the time it all evens out.

Many webmasters have found success with link exchanges and would not do without them. But, here again, it will be up to you to decide whether this system will be a benefit to your business or not, and it will be up to you as well to decide whether it's working once you've gotten into it. Give it some time to evaluate, as results don't come instantly.

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