Web Site Promotion Strategies

"Reciprocal Link  Strategies"

There are basically three parts to a successful web site promotion. One of the most important parts of a promotion strategy is to "HAVE A PLAN AND WORK THE PLAN!!!"

The reason I bring this up is that I use my plan to implement a strategy and I have a plan for each strategy that keeps me focused on the task at hand. Since, I have an overall plan I can leverage what I do saving time and utilizing resources to their fullest. What does this have to do with "Using Reciprocal Links to Promote a Web Site" and increase traffic to your web site?

Overview of Reciprocal Link Strategies

If you don't have an overall promotion plan as part of your strategy you have no way to accurately measure success and if you can't measure success you have no way to use your limited time wisely by repeating what worked in the past using tried and true resources.

You are much better off to use two of the strategies that work for you and your product than to try and use all the strategies with limited success. Use them all at first, measuring your success and then concentrate on what works. Your time is valuable and I personally believe that if you work smart rather then hard the results will be much better to increase web site traffic.

New reciprocal Link Strategy and Plan

The reason I am discussing this first is quite simple! I've found that not having a plan to prospect for and accept reciprocal links results in major inconveniences for me, my users, and associates that linked to my site. This is why you have a plan so you can refine it increasing your productivity and the usability of your site.

I'll give you an example to stress this point. The "WoD" is preparing to move to an ISP that my company and another local EDI and software developer are building. Webmaster T being the "Hit Ho" he is started worrying about the traffic we'd possibly loose as a result.

Knowing what we do about reciprocal links we decided a trip to AltaVista was needed to do a reverse lookup. This was before T developed the "Reciprocal Link Machine". More about that later.

The trip to the engine told us two things about our promotion plan and site. That short trip told us that our promotion plan has a major flaw and that the content on the site is not only useful but pretty highly regarded judging by the numbers, the quality of some of the sites and the comments from the sites that linked to us. "Thanks guys, much appreciated!!"

We were flabbergasted to find there were over 250 "KNOWN" links to the "WoD"! I only knew of about 50 and some of them weren't listed because the engines only list the sites that they have found linked to the "WoD" while spidering other sites. The 50 I knew about were reciprocal links for the awards, requests, and a few directories and engines we had listed with.

Update

This document was written about three years ago, however, much of the information is still a good start for a newbie. We are preparing to change providers again. There are now close to 600 links to the old Globalserve site and around 200 to this site.

The major flaw in our original reciprocal link plan was that we didn't provide a proper means to monitor "reactive" reciprocal links. We had a graphic posted and our url was no trouble, if the users there, they know where it is. But we didn't provide any incentives or means to inform us of the link. Yeah, T even has names for 'em so he can distinguish the two different types of reciprocal links when discussing them.

The first is a "proactive" link where you contact the owner or webmaster asking to exchange links. The other is a "reactive" link where a person reacts to your content and gives you a link without expecting one in return, quite often without even notifying you. This my friends is where we realized there was a flaw in our plan and strategy.

To maintain the "reactive" links we will be providing a form on the new site to enable users to easily inform us of the link and it's location. We will also be including a "Friends of the WOD" page where we can reciprocate links easier because at present we only link to sites that are providing above average content.