1. Drive Traffic to Your Site. A website without it is dead, even a thoroughly beautiful, effective, mouth-watering site. You must use tools used by the pros if you are going to drive targeted traffic to your site. One of the best, most underutilized tools on the net for ANYONE with any sized budget can use is: reciprocal linking.

2. You must create a presence on the web by linking your site with others. Because that's what the most successful sites on the web all have in common: They link with sites they would like to share visitors with and they drive traffic to their sites for free with a good, themed link directory. Not a directory of random links, but a directory of links most suited for your visitors and relative to the products, services and information you have on your site.

That's what you expect to be listed in on other webmasters' sites, so that's what you have to provide to them in return. You owe your visitors that and you owe your link partners that.

3. Link Popularity Google, for example, uses "link popularity" as an indicator of how "important" your site is. That is, if x number of people are linking to you, I mean they actually took the time out to "recommend" visiting you, then your site must be of "x" value to Google searchers.

Webmaster Traffic Tools went from zero visitors and no search engine ranking to a Number 1 listing on Google in less than two months solely because of my linking system. The search engines found me through another site, not by spidering me directly.

You see, when I link, I look for high-traffic sites that are already listed in the search engines with high ranking. Google spiders those sites frequently and 99% of the time they are going to run into your link somewhere else before they get around to visiting your site for the first time directly.

When they see your link they come over and spider your site 1) to guage whether the link FROM the other site is relevant to that site, giving them higher link popularity and, 2) to make their job easier they spider your site because they are already there.

4. Direct Website Traffic If you have done your job properly and sought out links with sites that have the EXACT kind of visitors you would LOVE to have at your site, you are going to get great amounts of traffic from the links you work so hard to secure with those sites. One good link can give you more traffic than all the search engines combined any day of the week!

5. Branding It takes consumers sometimes up to 7-10 "views" of a product or service before they decide to buy. Many online marketing experts point to autoresponders as a top way to get into the minds of potential customers repeatedly until they see you are a serious business and take that last look at what you have to offer.

Well, say you have 100-300+ links on sites that your best, most targeted potential customers visit regularly. They visit a site and there you are. They click a link to another related site and, bang, there you are AGAIN being recommended by yet another site they are interested in and appreciate!

Your name starts to become branded in their minds and they start thinking, "Man, Jack is everywhere and he must be serious business - EVERYONE points to his site!"

You are going to start converting people by pre-qualifying them to be receptive to whatever you offer BEFORE they even get to your site with this system!

6. Pre-Qualified Hyper-Targeted Traffic If you have a basic, keyword-laden, up-front description you use to put your link description on other peoples' sites, you are generating pre-qualified traffic to your site.

It's the same thing as when you are listed in the search engines properly. If you set up your site to be spidered properly and the result is a link that instantly defines exactly what your site is about in the description, the people who click that link come to you with EXPECTATIONS!

If you have done your job "on-site" and you fulfill those expectations, you are basically licensing yourself to print money!

With the walls of your customers down, all objections remaining to be dealt with on-site, after they click your link should be dealt with in your sales copy, or in your autoresponder sequence when you get them signed up on your list.

Then its all over. You have the last piece of the puzzle in turning browsers to buyers.

An article is no place to define a complete linking campaign. I wrote a 112 page ebook on the subject, so suffice it to say, there is a lot to this and there's always more you can do to cast your net on the internet sea of opportunity through linking.

I hope you have an idea now of the power and importance of linking and why you should spend a decent percentage of your marketing time on building and running a serious linking campaign for your site.

About the author: Jack Humphrey, one of the "luckiest" guys on the internet, is an Online Marketing Consultant and originator of several successful online ventures. You can find more articles by Jack at http://webmastertraffictools.com . See also http://power-linking-profits.com and http://equipmint.com