What is Link Trading and How Do You Trade?

What is Link Trading?

If you've ever been on social media and a website or brand has a huge following, you may have seen them trading or "promoting" their links with other sites or brands. This practice is called link trading. Link Trading is a way to get free exposure for your website, build up credibility and trust in your brand and can earn you valuable traffic over time by promoting the same content on multiple sites that have large audiences. But there are many ways to approach this including agencies, specific types of link building such as forum marketing and blog comment building, search engine optimization (SEO), etc.

There are as many different link trading opportunities as there are social networks available. Some use links in their tweets, some in a Facebook post, others in a Google+ update. You get the idea. It's almost easy to get lost figuring out how to trade links, who to trade with and figuring out if it's even worthwhile!

Link trading can be extremely simple or it can be very complicated and time consuming (a lot of work). It depends on your time constraints and how much you want to promote your website or brand. It also depends on how many social networks you want to participate in and how much exposure you're looking to get.

Many people simply "share" their website's link on social media or post them on an internet forum. This is very simple and takes no time. However, this won't bring you anything in the form of traffic to your website or trust in your website or brand in general.

A good example of this would be if someone were to add a link to their Twitter bio. That's it! There is no content (just a link) and no promotion of the content (they just share a text link).

Another example would be if someone were to share links on their Facebook page. Again, it's just a text link and there is no promotion of the content at all.

However, this is where it gets complicated (or more time consuming). You can take that same text link or add an image to it and trade links on forums such as Warrior Forum, Market Samurai Forum or other internet marketing forums. You could also post them on social media sites like Google+, Reddit and others. This will allow for interaction with your audience which can help build trust with your brand but may take some time depending on what forum you post on or what social site you decide to post your link in.

Another approach is to link trade on popular blogs. You can do this by finding popular blogs that fit your niche and contact them. You let them know that you would like to trade links with them and offer to promote their content in exchange for a link back to your site or brand. You can do this via email, Twitter, Facebook or other social portals or networks of your preference. This type of linking will require some time due to the fact that as the person doing the promoting you'll need to reach out and contact many people until you find someone who is willing to trade links with you.

Conclusion: Link trading can get complicated and confusing. There are many options, but the best way to find out is to simply try it and see what works best for you.

This post was written by a Warrior Forum Member (CFG)

Link Trading is a way to build credibility and trust for your brand, build traffic and potentially make money in many ways. The most common form of link trading are forum marketing, where you promote the same content on different forums. Most of these links are 1 - 2 word headlines that fit keywords that relate to your niche or site subject matter.