# 12 - Cross Link For Traffic

Cross Link For Traffic

By Chris Maher

Links are what make the web work. The ease of clicking your way around from site to site is the essence of the World Wide Web. Cross linking with other web sites should be part of your promotion strategy. A recent study indicted that perhaps half of all site visits will come from links on other sites or mentions in traditional media, like newspapers.

Traffic from those links will add to the stream of visitors coming to your site from the search engines, your off line promotion efforts, and your email invitations to past customers.

To effectively link with other sites, you must first think where your customer might be found online. Use the search engines to find those sites and send the webmaster e-mail asking them to cross link with you. Your e-mail should be friendly and show that you have visited and appreciate the site that the webmaster has created.

Commercial, government, and other large sites can be especially good sources of traffic for your site, but can be very tough to get links with. Ask yourself, why should these people want to link to me? What value do I bring them? The answer is to ask for a link to a specific part of your site, a part that would serve as a resource to the site you want to link to. For example, suppose you are a painter. Among your many subjects are lighthouses. If you find a site that is all about the history of lighthouses you know those visitors would be likely to be interested in your paintings of lighthouses. Don't just ask for a link to "your gallery", tell them you have a wonderful paintings of specific lighthouses, and give them those URLs directly. Then make sure you design those pages so they invite visitors to view the rest of your site as well.

Do you have written material on your site? Articles that you have written can be excellent incentives for other sites to link to you. Just think who would be interested in the subject, and contact other sites that cater to those people.

By saving your message in a notepad window, you can cut and paste it, with appropriate modification, and greatly speed the process of contacting many sites who might be interested in linking with you.

You should have a separate link page where you will put links to sites that you think will be of interest to your customers. It's not a good idea to put a external link on your home page itself. All the links there should be to other pages on you own site.

How will you know if other sites actually do link to you? Alta Vista has a great tool to do just that. Go to http://www.altavista.digital.com/ and put in the query link:http://www.yourdomainname.com (substitute your full URL for yourdomainname.com, of course) All the web pages that AltaVista knows about that link to your pages will be listed.

In this regard, many malls have a feature that may help you promote your own personal site. Stephanie Hansen, who's a stained glass artist, suggests that artists take advantage of the free link pages that many malls maintain. She submitted the following list of 38 sites that will list your web site for free:

The Added Touch
http://www.ctsi.net/addedtouch

All by-hand Arts & Crafts Co-op
http://www.allbyhand.com

America's Showplace Online
http://www.amershowplace.com

Arts & Crafts Internet Mall
http://www.artcraftmall.com

Auntie-dot-com
http://www.auntie.com/main.htm

Avant Garde
http://www.infoanalytic.com

Craft Cave
http://www.craftcave.com

Crafts-A Treasury of Artisan's Galleries
http://www.artplace.com/crafts

Crafts
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/6340/crafts.html

Crafts Fair Online
http://www.craftsfaironline.com

Crafty Links Mall
http://www.ivisions.com/crafty

Creative Enterprises
http://www.cchat.com/creative

Distinctive Treasures
http://www.d-t.com

Find Arts
http://www.find-arts.com

International Craft Directory
http://www.catalog.com/giftshop/icd/icd1.htm

Internet Craft Fair
http://www.duban.com/craft/craft.htm

InterNET CRAFTS Gallery
http://www.netcrafts.com

Jana's Craft Connection
http://www.wyomingcompanion.com/janacraft

Keepsake Creations Personalized Gifts & Albums
http://www.onebellevue.com/keepsake

Marketsuite
http://marketsuite.com/member3.html

New Mexico Craft Mall
http://www.nmia.com/~nmcm

Stained Glass Treasures
http://members.aol.com/StnGlsTres

The Sweet Pea Patch
http://www.bright.net/~darla/sppatch.htm

Wood-N-Crafts, Inc. Online
http://www.wood-n-crafts.com

World Crafts
http://www.fullfeed.com/~wrldcrft

World Shopping Mall & Directory
http://www.worldshopping.com

World Wide Arts Resources
http://www.wwar.com

WWW Fine Art Guide - Art Resource Directory
http://www.finearte.com/FineArtGuide

Another place that offers free links to artists and crafts people is R2001 MUTUAL ART LINKS. It's an unsorted system, but seems edited for quality content.

If you know of any places artists and crafts people can submit links, please contact me, I'll add them to the list.

Good web server log analysis software will tell you where you visitors are coming from. Watch for the cross linked sites that send you lots of visitors, and look for others like them to ask for more links. For more information, see my article Tracking Your Web Site Visitors.

Linking can be time consuming and frustrating when you don't get the links that you had hoped for. But a few good links can really help you build traffic, and that is worth the trouble.

This page last updated: 09/02/04

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