Google is most prominent of big boys to use this method, and it has brought me a lot of visitors to my hobby site. Hobby site? you may ask. Well you may be interested to read that I am also webmaster of www.irishboxingnews.com and have been for 2+ years.

The last time I checked on Altavista I had 169 sites linking to Irish Boxing News.com, and I am ranked number 3 on Google for search term 'boxing news' . I get about 25 - 40 visitors a day from Google for this search term alone.

Before Google introduced number of links to a site as a relevancy factor I wasn't even in top 20, now however because I have so many quality sites linking to Irish Boxing News.com googlebot feels I deserve position 3.

More search engines are likely to come around to this method of ranking as Google has shown with its tremendous growth that its a very effective method of establishing relevancy.

So hopefully you can see why reciprocal linking is so important to any 'serious' webmasters. My Irish Boxing News.com site gets about 150 visitors a day, not bad for a site without a budget plus it's a niche information site, and doesn't have broad appeal, anyway most of them come from search engines but about 50-60 come from links on other sites. Just Multiply them numbers by 4 or 5 for a site with mass appeal like an Internet Marketing site and you can really start to see power of developing links with other sites. BOTTOM LINE - GET LINKING NOW

If you want to check even further, you could contact publisher and find out how subscribers were obtained. Purchased subscribers tend to be less responsive than those that have readily signed up at publisher's website. If publisher has automatically subscribed people that have posted an ad at a classified site, don't EVEN go there!

Most publishers use multiple means of obtaining subscribers, which will yield a subscriber base that is hard to judge. Another good question to ask - Is list cleaned on a regular basis? Are addresses that have bounced several times removed? My list may be smaller because of it, but 3 times in a row and they're OUT!

You should now be able to narrow your list down to your favorite 3-5 ezines. The marketing "gurus" would give you a formula for determining if cost is within reason.

My formula? I like to place top sponsor ads or solo ads. (and free classified ads - but those I'll place in any targeted ezine! Hey, they only cost a little time!)

So... I look at all of my favorite targeted ezines, and discard any that are out of my price range. Then I look at those left to see which offers best price per subscriber for a top sponsor or solo ad. I'll try that one first.

Oh, and... don't forget to track your results!