From the beginning of commerce, businesses have been promoting the ideas and products of other businesses as a way to make their own business a successful one. For example, you may see that a real-estate company may promote a particular lawyer in order to close a sale while that lawyer will also promote that real estate company in his firm.

Everyone has heard of the barter system and may have thought that this system is outdated and is not used anymore. However, with modern technology, the barter system is still alive. People still trade services and items rather than using money. The business of Internet marketing is proof that the barter system is still alive.

In the Internet Marketing world, we call this new form of the barter system, cross promoting. This system is in place to trade of advertising space. Advertising companies in the past have charged top dollar for premium advertising space on the most prominent bill boards or a radio station that has millions of listeners.

Now, with the availability of the Internet, instead of paying for advertising space in this way, you would place the ad for your own home based business idea or opportunity on another website while the other website places their ad on your website. Cross promoting can be done in many ways and can be a very cost effective way for you to advertise your Internet business.

Reciprocal linking is one major way that webmasters help each other to advertise their products, services and opportunities. Exchanging links with other similar websites as your own, is a very effective, but you should also be aware of who your direct competition is and avoid promoting products and services that are exactly the same as yours.

One of the best things about exchanging links, or ads, with other similar websites is that each website benefits from becoming more popular in the eyes of the search engines. Search engines look at the number of links into a website from other websites throughout the Internet and determine the importance of each website based on these factors. For example, if you are able to exchange links with another website that has a higher search engine ranking than your own, you will benefit greatly from the popularity of that website.

Therefore, reciprocal linking to a more popular site, can not only help increase your advertising ability and website traffic, but will also increase the popularity of your own website by being rated higher in search engine rankings.

Reciprocal linking leads into more opportunities to promote more of your ideas to your customers, or even potential customers, when they subscribe to your ezine, or newsletter. When you get a subscription to your publication, you can now use this as an opportunity to use cross promote your other ideas and opportunities.