3. INCREASED EXPOSURE Through sharing your expertise and knowledge within your Internet networking community, you earn trust and recognition among your peers. Your participation serves as your initial means of gaining exposure and becoming better established as an expert in your field.

4. ENDLESS REFERRALS Once your fellow networkers come to know and trust you, you will begin to experience fruits of your networking efforts. Not only will your peers be more apt to utilize your services; they will be quick to refer others to you. This generates a cycle of word-of-mouth advertising that will contribute more to your growth than high dollar advertising.

Networking through Internet communities offers a sense of reassurance in that it bridges gap by providing resources to entrepreneur that may not otherwise be readily available or easily accessible. As your networking experiences begin to produce growth for your business, it is important that you remain an intricate part of group and give back as frequently as you can. As an active networker, you can turn an ordinary business venture into an extraordinary success!

So next question is how to build up number of high quality links to your site - here's a few ideas to get you started:

* Swap links with others' sites. Every link swap you set up will eat up a slice of your time - so concentrate on finding sites where it's clear link will be valuable to you. Be polite, add your link to them before you approach them, and don't be too picky if it's you who is doing approaching (just don't ask for a link if you're going to make a bunch of rules).

* Evaluate link requests. If you have a links page (and probably if you don't) and a reasonable amount of traffic - you will undoubtedly get link swap requests from other webmasters. Take a moment to look at their site and their links page before deciding if it's a good deal for you.

* Add a "link to us page". Create a page on your site, which includes information on how (detailed instructions), and why, to link to your site. Make it easy, make it valuable to other webmasters (by for example giving them free content), and over time number of links to you will grow.

* Pay for links. Start your own affiliate program and pay other sites to link to you. You can pay them a percentage of sales they generate for you, or for each visitor they send. The nice thing about this is if you make your program reasonably flexible and commissions in line with your goals, then affiliates will figure out ways to send you kind of traffic you want.

* Create your own free downloadable information product (like E-Books or software for example). Make sure it ties in with main theme of your site - is valuable to users - and then list it at every shareware and freeware directory you can find (there are literally hundreds of these). Most will link directly to downloadable file - but many will also add a free permanent link to your home page (or your page about product). It's worth knowing that some shareware and freeware sites like http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/ and http://download.cnet.com/ have quite incredible amounts of traffic.

Whichever strategies you use to build up links to your site, always be sure that time you put into establishing each link is in balance with value of that link. Keep things in proportion, use your knowledge of "link value" to your advantage, and get linked for mega traffic!