Imagine meeting somebody for first time on one of many relationships sites and then after an extremely brief introduction, you ask them to marry you? What sort of reaction would you expect? The nice lady will probably slap you, if there was a way of doing that online. (Although I must hasten to add that there are enough cranks out there these days so that out of every hundred or so marriage proposals you make in this way, it’s possible to get a couple of YES’s.)

So why do we expect a different reaction when we briefly introduce ourselves and then ask client to buy from us? Or do few cranks who actually buy encourage us to continue doing same unviable thing?

Is it any wonder that posting articles free on web is most effective way of advertising on net? It is actually a very powerful way of building a relationship because other person gets to know your lengthy intimate thoughts on a pet subject of theirs. Quick tip: The more intimate your article, quicker you will build relationships with those who read it.

This key or secret, or whatever you want to call it, is enough to make all difference in your online marketing efforts.

Just calm down for a while and forget all those make-millions-in-your-sleep-in-5-minutes schemes. Make an effort to put aside all those SPAMMING schemes and just slow down and take slower but more effective path to success online. Concentrate on building relationships. Your customer base will grow much more slowly, but it will be a more solid one. And besides there are ways of quickly expanding it later, once you have a solid base – like giving existing customers incentives to refer their friends to you.

This is second in a series of three articles showing you how to find a suitable linking strategy for your website and put it to work for you.

Link strategy number one: The Front Page Link Swap.

The most important page on your site is naturally home page and as this is page that is most often pointed to by internal and external links this is page that carries most “linking power”. This is more usually called “page rank” (Google) or “Yahoo Web rank” (Yahoo).

Important note: If you are promoting an e-book, guide, tutorial or you are using a similar marketing technique then you should make your links come back to promotional page and not your home page. As this is page that you will want to go out and compete for you in search engines.

The way that linking algorithms is of course a closely guarded secret, however it’s known that more links that you have on a page less “linking power” is assigned to each link on page. Thus a links page with 75 links on it is going to give little benefit in link boost and also a small amount of traffic, it is after all competing with 74 other links.

This is where front page link swap is such a powerful strategy.

By swapping a link from your homepage with a link from another site of equal or greater linking power you are getting a far bigger return in terms of both link value and traffic than you would for exchanging links on a buried links page.

The downside is that to find willing and co operative webmasters to do exchange is very time consuming.