Designing a web site is hard enough. You spend countless hours working on how it is going to look and what cool specials effects it is going to have. You even spent hours picking out your site colors. So now what?

Now you have to promote it. But how? There are many ways. You can submit them to search engines, join a pay per click advertising program and link exchanges. Of these link exchanges are the ones most picked, mainly because they are free. But do they work.

According to the emails that keep coming into my inbox, link exchange is dead. The big search engines know what they are about. Back scratching. You link to me and I will link to you. It does not help your SEO or your quest to be #1 on Google or Yahoo. But it does give you awareness to the people you exchanged links to. And this can be helpful.

I believe there is no one way to get your site ranked number one with anyone. But I do think if you plan your strategy correctly and use all of the tools available to you, you can get what you are looking for. You designed your site and you know what your audience is looking for. You may even know where your audience is.

So just because you hear certain marketing methods are dead, dont give up hope and sell your domain name. Use the normal process to get ranked among the big boys and use you link exchanges for awareness to you targeted audience.