What strategies will you use? - Contests - Forums - Free reports/e-book - Newsletter - Pay per click advertising - Banners - Articles/content - Viral marketing

Timeline Assign a project date to each of strategies. Will they be one time events (contest) or something you need to do frequently (forums)? While you are thinking about it, schedule your projects in your time management system or planner.

Analysis - How will you track success of your marketing plans? What is your ROI?

Budget - What is your total yearly internet marketing budget? - Assign a $ to each of strategies you will use.

A successful internet marketing strategy begins with a plan. The time you take to put together your "micro-plan" will be well worth it to your business.

Say your web site has a 1% conversion ratio. That means for every 100 visitors that visit your site, you make one sale. Now what about rest 99. They are looking for something else, isn't it? So what do they do? They have 3 options:

a) Go back to previous site.

b) Visit your links page (if you have one), hoping that they would find information on sites listed there.

c) End their browsing session.

So which do you think is best option? I would definitely want my visitors to go to my links page and visit my link partners rather than go back. Because I know that my link partners would send some visitors in same way to my site.

Now this exchange would only happen if we had a prominent link to our links page on all pages of our site, should our visitors decide to leave us any time.

-----Side Bar----- There are some sites that have their links page designed for link partners rather than for their visitors!

They'll use following texts to link to their links page: "Let's Trade Links", "Trade Links" and so on... Such sites are more interested in finding link partners than providing information to their visitors. The end result is link partners visiting each other's site. -----Side Bar-----

3) Look out for sites that have tightly themed and categorized links page.

Sites that trade links solely for search engine rankings have links to sites on almost all subjects on their links page. Typically ranging to hundreds of them on a single page. These pages are never going to be visited by those looking for additional information.

Whereas sites that have their links categorized are more user friendly and are more likely to attract visitors.

Conclusion

There is no point in looking for quality sites when YOUR links page is designed without keeping interests of your visitors in mind. Only when we start thinking of our links page as a service to our visitors rather than a tool for higher search engine ranking, we'll be able to make most from reciprocal links.