1: Find Qualified Sites
There are a few important things to keep in mind when finding websites to exchange links with.
-How popular is their site? It’s much better for both your direct traffic and search engine rankings to have links coming to your site from high ranking, popular websites. While it’s better to have lower-ranking links than none at all for your personal website, always aim high.
-How closely related is their site to mine? A link from a site relevant to your niche will be much more valuable than a random, irrelevant link.
-Are they a spam site or link farm? Not only will exchanging links with a spam site not help you, but it will actively hurt you and your web page. Google and other search engines tend to penalize sites that have a lot of incoming links from known spam sites.
2: Write your Pitch
The key to writing up your pitch is to be as polite and as brief as possible. Don’t beat around the bush and write up a long, multi-page message about wanting to exchange links. Be clear about what you’re asking for, be unambiguous about the partnership you want to establish with them, and always be kind with your words. Not everyone is going to exchange links with you, but you will increase your conversion rate if you treat them with respect and not as just another anonymous webmaster that you want to take advantage of.
3: Solicit a Link
Email is the best way to send your pitch. Don’t simply shoot your message off to the first email address you find on the qualified sites you find, make sure that you send your message to someone who might actually have the ability to make the exchange happen.
4: Wait
The two keys to a successful link exchange campaign are persistence and patience. People who create a website, especially a popular website, tend to be busy and tend to have to answer a lot of random, unsolicited email every day. No matter how important you think your message or your free website is, your solicitation is nothing more than another unexpected piece of mail that someone else has to get to when convenient. This can take weeks, so you need to be patient. Shooting off a follow up email too soon will spell death for your efforts.
5: Post Their Link
You need to open up your website software and post your new partner’s link on your website as soon as they post your link. Not only is it rude to wait a long time to do them the favor that they have done you, but it increases the chances that they will simply take down your link on their site immediately.
You should also never remove their link from your site, even after your link has been posted on their site. Once again, it’s both disrespectful and greatly increases the chances that they will return the favor.
6: Track Your Visitors
You should already have a good quality analytics program embedded in your website (like Google Analytics) but you should start checking it regularly to see where your traffic is coming from. Essentially, you want to see which of the links that you’ve gotten posted on other sites are actually driving direct traffic to your site. Identifying which sites are most effective for bringing you traffic is important because it will help you refine and perfect your link exchanging campaign. When you know what sites help you and which don’t, you can focus your efforts on finding more of those successful sites while avoiding the likely failures.
7: Keep doing it
Link exchanging isn’t something you do once and then forget about, it’s something that you should continuously work at to continuously promote your free website. You should actively solicit links on a daily (or at the least weekly) basis and you should always be on the lookout for new potential partners to get in contact with.
