The spirit of reciprocity has a big part to play for anyone who wishes to progress in business, and attracting traffic to a website can certainly be aided by this spirit. What is important is that you do things in the right way. One of the soundest ways to use the principle of reciprocity to drive traffic to your website is in building a link exchange. This is something that takes a bit of effort and patience, and when people try to force the issue they will find that it does not work for them.
Forcing a link exchange usually takes the following pattern: Having noticed the popularity of a website, you link to it from your own. Having done this, you then email the webmaster of that site saying “We have placed a link from your site from ours. Please look at ours and see what you think – we’d love it if you placed a link to it on your site.” This seeks to make the webmaster of that site feel pressurised into saying “If they have linked to us and asked us directly, we might look bad for refusing”.
It is nonetheless in the hands of the website owner to do just that – refuse. That is their right and it is possible to gain a bad reputation by haranguing them to do something they don’t want to do. It is better instead to email them and say “I read your website and was impressed. I hope you don’t mind if I link to you from my site.” You place a link to your site in the email and let them make the choice – if you do this, they may well go to the lengths of mentioning you on their site, too.
