If you've tried other marketing techniques with less than optimal results, try this under-emphasized method of promoting your site. You will be surprised at how much traffic you can create by establishing reciprocal links with businesses in your industry and even your competitors!

100 Visitors A Day In Just 10 Days!

Sound too good to be true? It's not if you employ a methodical and consistent approach. In a moment, I'll tell you exactly how to trade links with quality Web sites that will bring you traffic. But first, let's do some math.

If you can trade links with 100 quality sites that each receive 100 visitors a day and the average click through ratio is 1%, then you will receive 100 visitors a day to your Web site. Sounds simple, but how do you find 100 "quality" sites that will link to you?

How To Find "Quality" Web Sites

The first step is to define your target market and make a list of 10 keywords that people would use to find your business. Next, choose your favorite search engine (i.e. Infoseek, Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo, WebCrawler, Lycos, or HotBot) and enter the first keyword on your list. Take the top 20 search results and visit each Web site that you think is related to your business and might be willing to trade links with you.

Note: You can download a free copy of WebFerret to make this process much faster. This nifty software searches the major search engines for pages that link to a specific URL (i.e. your competitors) or by keyword search as outlined above. http://www.ferretsoft.com

Next, right-click on their e-mail address and copy it to the clipboard. Open your favorite e-mail program or Notepad and paste it into a mailing list called "links.txt." Continue doing this until you have approximately 100 e-mail addresses. Assuming you search for 10 keywords and visit 20 Web sites from each search, you should find half of these sites to be acceptable.

Making Your Offer

Now that you have your list of 100 link prospects, write a persuasive message stating the benefits of trading links. In the subject line, type "Let's Trade Links For Profit." Send the e-mails all at once and then wait for confirmations. You can get a free mailing list manager from List Pro! at: http://submitpro.net

You'll be surprised at how cooperative people are! I have experienced a 10% positive response to my proposal. Now, if you do this for 10 days and get 10 "quality" links each day, you should get at least 100 hits every day! Can you imagine what you could do in a year?

Hidden Benefit

Trading links with high-traffic Web sites will improve your search engine rankings! Infoseek, AltaVista, Excite, and WebCrawler all use link popularity in their formulas for ranking your site.

Link popularity is measured by tracking the number of links to your site and the "quality" of those links. So, it is better to have one link on a high-traffic site than links on 10 sites that get very little traffic.

Tracking Your Traffic

To find out how much traffic you are getting from each link, you need to look at referring domains and determine which links bring you traffic and which ones you should replace. Remember, quality is the key. It's better to have 10 links that bring you traffic than 100 duds that take up space on your site.

You can get a free tracking system at http://extreme-dm.com and if you're really serious, download Cliff's Link Trader at http://www.shavenferret.com/scripts. This is a free script that tracks the number of hits each link receives, lets you limit the number of links displayed, and checks for return links.

----------
Derrick VanDyke is the owner of Submit Pro! Marketing.
Find Out How Hundreds of Successful Marketers Are Promoting Their Businesses On-Line.
http://submitpro.net
webmaster@submitpro.net