There are various ways to build traffic to your blog or website.  Most involve detailed work, such as search engine optimization, passing out business cards, listing on blog directories, and commenting on high-traffic blogs.  An easier–and free–way to build traffic is through a link-for-review exchange.

How It Works

Find a blog that has a bit more traffic than your blog or website.  Offer the author of that blog a link on your blog or website to his or her blog.  In return, you ask that he or she write a short review of your blog or website and post it on their blog with a link back to your site. 

A Win-Win Situation

The review from the blog author (who has more traffic than you) drives traffic to your site.  The increased traffic you have, in turn, benefits the blog author because the link you placed on your site to their blog receives more exposure. 

Focus on Smaller Blogs

You can’t go after the big fish like the John Chow’s and the Jeffrey Shoemaker’s of the world.  Those individuals charge for reviews.  (John Chow actually charges $450 for a review on his blog.)  Instead, you have to focus on smaller blogs that have less traffic than the big ones.  But these blogs, while small, have to be big enough to have some significant level of traffic.  Without some degree of traffic, you won’t get the exposure you want.  And you’ll waste space on your site by placing a link back to the blog that reviews you.

A Review of flimjo.com

I recently did this link-for-review exchange two days ago.  I am listed on Blog Catalog.  (In fact, here is my blog detail page.)  On that site, I saw a post on a discussion board regarding this type of exchange.  The author of a blog called Aya’s Blog Review offered to do a review of at least 50 words in exchange for a link back to her blog.  I placed a link to her blog on my Blogroll (over on the right side of this page), and I replied to the post on the discussion board and requested a review.  She wrote the review very quickly and posted it within hours.  You can read it here. 

Other Benefits

There are other benefits involved in this type of exchange.  

First, if the offer for reviews appears on a discussion board or in a similar forum, the blog offering the review will, no doubt, increase its traffic.  People will respond and request for reviews, and they will visit the blog frequently to check out their reviews.  They will also point other people to the blog that reviewed them, which further increases traffic to that blog.  The result?  You get even more exposure.  And it didn’t cost you a penny. 

Second, the blog that offers reviews might offer other perks you can take advantage of.  For example, the blog that reviewed flimjo.com is going to launch an award section that ranks the best blogs in select categories.  She states that the only blogs she will consider are those blogs that she reviewed.  Thus, my blog already qualifies, and I don’t have to do anything else.  If she selects my blog as a top blog for some select category (like money, investing, etc.), I will gain even more exposure and a flood of new traffic.

A link-for-review exchange is an excellent and economical way to build traffic.  When you’re just starting a blog, and you have financial limits (like me), you have to be resourceful in order to build traffic.  Search engine traffic takes several months to build, and if you don’t optimize your blog or website properly, it might take even longer.  In the meantime, you have to focus on other methods (like networking, commenting, and blog directories) to build traffic.  Requesting reviews in exchange for links is another valuable method. 

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