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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.

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 aspect is that you want targeted link exchanges relating to your website niche. For instance if your website is about dogs, you wouldn’t want link exchanges about real estate. You would want topics that are about dogs and interest to dog owners. You obviously would want to try to link with sites that have higher page rankings than your site does to boost your site’s page rank in the process. Not always easy to do.

There are directories out there that can be great to list your website with to gain one way links to your site. There are both free and paid sites, some have great page ranks, some do not, so do some research. The main thing you’re looking for, is getting those links to your site to improve your organic website’s traffic.

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 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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