Am I making a crucial mistake?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Do also join our FREE membership where you will find tons of bonus marketing reports, cheatsheet and guides. Yep. 0 charge, 100% value. Join NOW!

I was reading SiteProNews, a popular webmaster resource newsletter recently, and in their latest issue, there was a point mentioned that got me thinking and questioning myself.

Real hard.

Ok the point in case here is about reciprocal linking.

Here is the exact excerpt:

“ Linking Your Way To Obscurity
You know the reciprocal linking strategy everyone is talking about as a way to generate leads? Did you ever consider that each link to another website is an invitation to leave your site? Is that really what you want - to invite people to leave? I think not! “

I have not actually done any reciprocal linking yet. In fact all my outgoing links are either either affiliate links or 1 way links out.

My affiliate links on this blog are purely just for some small side income (my other sites which are in the works will be the one bringing in the main dough), very small change to the best net marketers out there.

I merely want to write about my views and thoughts here, come out with some articles of value, and maybe earn a little just to make my time spend writing to recommend (and dare I say educate?) more worthwhile.

As for 1 way links out, it doesn’t matter to me if the other party doesn’t reciprocate with a link back to my site.

What matters more to me are that the links, be it affiliate ones or not, are truly products and resources that I feel can provide, YOU, the readers with worthy information of beneficial and useful values.

In fact, in this post, I wrote that the readers here should not just plainly trust my recommendations blindly, and that they should do their own due diligence in judging if they are of value or not.

Yes I do know I am potentially giving away traffic, and these people may never come back. Not that I have much traffic to speak of actually, since I’ve not done any serious promotion of note (though I’ve been surprised that I’m actually getting some hits from people from all over the world).

However I don’t really care if these people click out of my blog through any outgoing links here. It is my intention since I started my blog to provide some good information and resources to people who visit here. This is to compensate them of their time they took to come here, instead of it being possibly better spent elsewhere. My way of saying thanks.

It will continue to be so now and will be in future as well, regardless of whether people do come back or not as they click out.

I will just let the readers judge if my site is worth coming back for. If they don’t, it means I’m doing something wrong, and I will have to work a bit harder.

If they do remember to come back after visiting the sites I have recommended and talked about, that will be great, and will motivate me to find out and write about more great resources.

To be honest, I do intend to use this blog to spread the word about my other upcoming sites, and of course, any visitors to those sites can potentially bring in some income for me.

However at the end of the day, I always believe that in order to receive, one has to give (from the heart). This is what I will continue to do. So please stay tuned!

P.S I can forsee that people will click on the SiteProNews link at the start of this post out of my site. But it’s ok! I read SiteProNews fairly regularly and it’s good! Hopefully the readers here will feel the same too.

Technorati tags: mistake, recommendations, value, beneficial, SiteProNews, reciprocal, affiliate, links