Strategy is defined as a careful plan or method, the art of devising a plan, employing plans toward a goal, or clever tricks for a quick or artful way of getting a result. At SmartFinds Internet Marketing we seek to gain value from each task necessary for marketing a client's website through a variety of Internet technologies.

Link Exchanges are one such area where you can ?kill 4 birds with one stone?. We are sure you know all four of them; it's certainly no secret, merely a matter of putting them together to work in your favor. Let us start from the beginning.

The Link Exchange Process

There are four steps in the link exchange process. This assumes you are not using link farms or other short-cut methods of link exchanges. If you do not use short-cut link exchange methods you will reap the triple-rewards we discuss in this writing, rewards that short-cut link exchange methods will not provide you.

1. The first step in the link exchange process is to ask the destination website if they wish to exchange links with you. You do not want to add their link information to your site at this time since you do not know if they would like to exchange links. You may have a lower ranking, you may not be in the same industry, and/or there may be a certain level of competition.

2. If they accept, then you would add their URL, title and description, provided by them, to your website.

3. Next, you inform them of their link on your website and request they add your link information to their website. You would now provide them your URL, title and description.

4. Once they have added your link information to their website they would then notify you of the completed process.

For purposes of this article, we will not discuss other details of the link exchange process in this writing. Details of the link exchange process can be found in abundance on the web covering details of maintaining email addresses, link urls, monitoring methods, etc.

The Quad-Exchange

If you take a look at the four steps above you may notice in at least two of the steps above the destination website will visit your website. Once to determine if they wish to exchange links with you and the other to confirm their link is on your website. How do we benefit from this process?

1st Exchange Value

The most obvious is that you are indeed completing a link exchange, thus increasing your link popularity on the web and helping your page ranking.

2nd Exchange Value

You are generating traffic for each link exchange you request to your website. The traffic is creating unique visitors and from a variety of locations.

3rd Exchange Value

The product or service you are selling is of value to the destination website. They may likely become a customer or a business partner to refer business to you. Seek out your link exchanges that have this type of potential.

4th Exchange Value

How about creating credits for traffic exchange services? Let's take, for instance:

Exit Exchange You can open an account with them at their website: here

They will provide you a code that you can add to all of your link pages. As visitors come to your link pages a pop-under will appear creating traffic for you on the Exit Exchange network of 80,000 websites.

Can we benefit further from this in a subtle way without making our link exchange partners frustrated by bombarding advertising? Certainly. Traffic Swarm provides a subtle method of setting up both referrals and traffic. You can visit them at here.

By now you are probably thinking of a variety of other methods to consider for gaining the best value from your link exchange process. Certainly there are many other similar ideas you can employ. Make your link exchange page useful to your link partners. They could be seeking other marketing methods and would certainly try any recommendations you have on your website.

Please be considerate when employing these methods on your website. If you do too much and the link partner is annoyed then they may very easily decide to not engage in the link exchange process. One pop-under everyone is willing to endure. More than that and you will drive traffic away, not to, your website. Instead, use some of the real estate on your link pages to recommend other services.

We hope we have given you something new to think about regarding the link exchange process and certainly recommend that you visit us at SmartFinds to learn more about our Internet Marketing Strategies.