Reciprocal Links

The idea of reciprocal links is that you allow someone to place a link on your page if they allow you to place a link on theirs. Sounds like a simple process, in theory yes, in practice no. You will not accomplish much if the link that you place on your partner’s page has the same pathetically small amount of clicks as your page. There have been some great real-life stories of web site owners putting their links on high traffic pages and becoming overnight successes. It can and does happen. This is where your research abilities will payoff. Finding the right link for your product and persuading the owner of the site to place your link, is an arduous task but one that will benefit you immensely. It is definitely worth the effort to find an appropriate partner that will allow you to place your banner on their page. In the long run, it is the least expensive and the simplest way to increase traffic to your web site.

You need to remember that all reciprocal links are not the same. For example if you sell sports equipment a reciprocal link from an online flower shop really does you no good and if you have to many of non site specific links you could even be penalized by a Google or Yahoo. If you employ a linking service be careful about choosing partner links and ensure that they have relevance to your site in some way. 

A free service that is a notch above the rest is LinkMetro.com at (http://www.linkmetro.com/index.php) You can join for free and you will be able to semi-automate the link request process. They offer an upgraded version that is fee based that is fully automated.  

Link Metro gives you a really good start as it provides a constant stream of linking partners to you. Use the filters function to limit the types of links you are interested in. Remember that a link to your site is only worth it if it comes from a niche that has some relevance to your site. A link for the sake of creating a link really isn’t worth it and in the long run the search engines that really count dismiss these types of links entirely.

A better and safer way to get backwards links is to use a text link service such as . They can place your link on very high quality sites that are commensurate with yours. These types of links work very well with the major search engines.

Also don’t get involved in any “link farms,” A link farm can be identified as an automated link to a page that is not connected directly to its home page. We receive many offers for link exchanges, however less than 10% are approved because they have no relevance to our site. They can hurt your listing chances more than you know. 100 Good quality links are worth more than 1,000 non-targeted links. Utilize Link Metro’s screening system to target higher Google Page Ranks in addition to site relevance.  

Remember that we all started at the bottom so if a legitimate site, with a low rank contacts you for a link don’t dismiss it completely take the opportunity to evaluate the source.  

Twitter:

Social networking has quickly become a very popular and effective way to promote your site, product or service. Although social networking is what it says, social networking. It's the ability to connect with friends family or collegues and let them know what you are doing in 140 charaters or less.Twitter is one of the most popular because of its simplicity,but because of ots simplicity it also lends itself really well to promotion of just about anything. It's an easy process to sign up for free at www.twitter.com .

The way in which Twitter works, as a business tool, is you add short descriptives that are 140 characters or less, that describe what you are currently doing, a website that you liked, a product you tried, a blog you like and so on. The object is to get as many "followers" as you can. The more followers the more popular you or your site are.

Twitter works well with businesses a bit better than Facebook because of the simpler interface. We have been using Twitter for a few months now and find that it's a great source of traffic for our websites. you can follow us at www.twitter.com/HBRHomeBusiness if you like.

We offer an inexpensive primer on how to maximize your usage of Twitter at www.twittasaurus.com It's a simple eBook on how to set up Twitter and maximize it's use for a business.

Summary:

As you begin the process of promoting your site, you will find that the utilizing many different types of exposure will always be the most beneficial. As I have outlined above, there are many cost-effective ways of promoting your site, and you will need to experiment with each one to find the right fit for your product and site. From experience, I can tell you that you need to be patient, this is not an overnight process.

Resources:

Advertising:

Google AdWords “If you want results you will need to advertise here.” 

SEO Tools:

XML-Sitemaps “ Free online process for 500 pages or less, if you have more than 500 pages you will need to upgrade to a paid version.” 

Google Webmaster Tools “Free service from Google with lots of good information.”

XSitePro has SEO tools built into it that are actually very good and simple to use. Additionally XSite Pro has the capability to create Google XML sitemaps automatically and alert Google to the changes each time you upload to your site.

AutoResponders:

AWeber: “Very popular with Internet Marketers, very easy to set up”

Get Response: “A very good autoresponder with plenty of extras. You can also buy opt-in names from GetResponse as well. Just recently revamped their entire site and process. Very competitive with Aweber.”