You can do same thing. One of my personal favorite tricks is to print double sided business cards. Team up with someone who caters to your same niche market but does not directly compete with you. Print each person's business card on one side of a standard business card. Print twice as many and each of you carries a stack. Abbraa Cadaabbraa! You begin helping your friend make personal contacts while they do same for you.

It always pays to be human instead of pushy. Don't be overly aggressive or scary in your contacts. Just friendly and helpful. I always give my initial contact emails and letters a final reading over and ask myself, if this were coming from my already pesky little sister, would I be irritated? If you can pass that test, then you area ready to go.

Are you writing people you don't know, and letting them know you're out there? Email makes it SO easy. Just don't "bug" people unnecessarily.

There was a time when only most aggressive of sales people seemed to really utilize this human contact networking approach. More and more people are doing so today. With growth of online communities, we are becoming more comfortable with process. But don't be fooled into thinking that involvement in a community alone is not networking in this intensive form. You have to make personal, one on one contacts. It isn't enough to be known in your group. You must be known by your group.

Go to Yahoogroups.com and pull up home page for any email list that you are already subscribed to. Note how many subscribers there are. Now compare that number to number of regular posters. There is usually a huge difference. Don't just read emails. Participate!

Remember, Internet is about community. Some people take this all so literally and focus like hell on making discussion forums on their site active. That's fine, but there are many ways to build up a community of peers who can be called upon to do little favors for you. The endorsement of already respected online authors may well be more valuable to your site than a little bit of chatter amongst anonymous participants in your or somebody else's forum.

It is so important that you be on a prospect's mind when they actually decide to make a purchase. That is why drip and viral marketing are so popular. That is why so many of us use autoresponders. That is why we create mailing lists and use them over and over and over again.

Make a point of bumping into more well-placed people at "virtual water cooler" via email, and don't be surprised if many of them find a way to incorporate you and your site into their plans.

This is not one of those crazy get rich quick schemes. It's real networking. It is how each of us can build a successful online business doing whatever it is that we do. As such, this strategy has real staying power.

Grab your virtual broom and step out your virtual front door. Sweep some virtual steps and be human online. Make some new virtual friends.

So typical daily cycle is (a) let Zeus run for a while (a full day, perhaps) looking for sites, (b) examine what it finds and accept or reject sites and assign to categories, (c) send emails to webmasters, (d) update status of sites as webmasters respond, and (e) upload your new link exchange pages with updates. If that's really all you want to do, then Zeus is an excellent choice for you.

Zeus is very good at things it does. The robot is excellent (if properly trained) at choosing web sites for your exchange. The email organizer is excellent for keeping a record of webmaster contacts and page creation system lets you create a very nice looking link exchange program. The templates are complex out of necessity, but they are very functional and can be heavily modified without much trouble.

On other hand, I've found that using Zeus is a major headache at times. The program is difficult to train and very difficult to correct later if you happen to train in a pattern which you do not like. It requires constant attention, and robot is exceptionally slow (my system is a 2-gigahertz, dual processor monster and program runs sllloooooww).

Perhaps major problem with Zeus is a huge feature that it does not have. Zeus does not check links for you. This is an issue because it is important that link exchange sites maintain a link back to your own site, and it is a serious drawback to program. You must check linkbacks manually.

Another issue is a choice that developer made - he uses an Access database. Access is infamous for data corruptions and other issues, especially as databases get larger and more complicated. In addition, Access databases tend to be exceptionally slow. There are many better choices for databases which are faster and more robust.

I think my final hesitation towards this program is extremely confusing and frustrating user interface. Program controls are in strange places, they are poorly explained and difficult to find. There is an incredible amount of data presented which is probably very thrilling to designer, but to most of us it simply doesn't matter. I would highly recommend to developer that next version do a complete redesign, and this time field test it with some actual users.

There is a free version of Zeus, but you will need to purchase PRO version if you want to make it's link pages match your site. Check out free version, but be prepared to spend several long days learning system and training it to know what you want.

Would I recommend Zeus? Well, it depends. Zeus is a valuable tool and it is useful in a link exchange strategy. On other hand, I've found that Zeus tends to turn a daily activity which is a chore into an organized chore. The major drawback, and my main hesitation, is exceptionally poor performance. I purchased tool and I do use it on a regular basis - however, even on my monster machine it is annoying slow. So I would hesitantly recommend this program, with above-mentioned caveats.