Have you ever thought about promoting your site? It does not really matter if your site is about your cat, a product you want to sell or mythology ... presumably you are trying to communicate something to
entire world, or at least a portion of it. It's a pretty sure bet that somewhere in world at least one (or hopefully more) person would want to see your site.However, site promotion offers perhaps biggest challenge of all to most webmasters. How in heck do you get word out about your site to people who need or want to know? To make matters even more confusing you have to follow a poorly defined set of ethical standards; if not, you might be accused of spamming, and who wants that?
If you are like most other webmasters, you've tried just about everything. You've submitted to search engines (these are fair traffic generators) and FFA lists (worthless), created an ezine (good source of return traffic), added your site to webrings (minor but sustained traffic) and even added your site to dozens of top site lists. Sure, you've managed to get some traffic to your site, but still no where near big leagues.
If you've done all this and nothing else, then you've missed a couple of biggest traffic-generators of all: viral marketing (not discussed in this article) and link exchanges.
Exchanging links should be a normal part of your promotional habits. In fact, best strategy that I've learned over years is simply to keep my eyes open as I surf. As I visit sites, I enjoy what they have to offer, learn what they are attempting to teach, and decide if I want to exchange links with them. What is this decision based upon? Whether or not I believe web site has value to my own readers. That's only criteria that's important - if link does not have value to my readers then they will figure it out and will lose trust in me. This can be fatal to getting return visitors.
Building up a proper link exchange is a constant, daily effort which should never cease. This is perhaps one of most time consuming efforts of all - building up and maintaining a link exchange.
That's where a product called Zeus comes into play. This interesting program theoretically automates a fair portion of link exchange process. What you do is "teach" Zeus what kind of sites you want to include in your exchange. At first you do this explicitly by specifying keywords, then you do it implicitly by accepting or rejecting sites.
It's a long and tedious process, but in end you do wind up with a reasonably intelligent robot. Now you cut it loose on internet. The robot (it's really a spider) examines web pages, looking here and there for pages (sites) which match it's internal set of rules.
Once you have let Zeus run for a while it will build up a list of a few sites (or a few hundred, depending on what it finds). Now Zeus works more or less like a surfing tool - you just visit each site using Zeus browser, examine it, then indicate which category (if accepted) you want it to appear in. You can then tell Zeus to send an email to webmaster of site, and handle any additional correspondence as needed.
The other task that Zeus is good for is maintaining link exchange pages themselves. This is especially useful in PRO version (costs a few hundred dollars), as you can customize these pages as much as you want.
