There comes a time in your efforts to market your website that you realise that it's no longer enough to tell your family and friends to visit your website - you need to get some people who will pay you in cash rather than compliments. You need to start approaching other website owners and start building an online network of contacts.

This is a crucial step to achieving online success. I once read a quote that applied at the time to conventional 'bricks and mortar' businesses but it just as pertinent if not more so for online businesses:

"You will not be successful by being a cave dweller."

Kind of obvious but there are so many business owners that are cave dwellers. Sitting in their offices staring at the phone day after day wondering why no new prospects ever phone them up. You have to stand up, open the door and get out into the world and shout from the rooftops about your business. If you're online you need to do the same for your website.

One of the best ways to do this is to establish reciprocal links with other relevant websites. But this is where Public Enemy No. 1 comes in - if you don't know how to bypass it all your efforts to contact the website owners and establish links with them will be in vain.

Those nasty spam monsters that roam the web harvesting email addresses from all web pages and then bombarding them with member enlargement hormones and get rich quick schemes have made it hard for you.

If you decide to try and email a website owner using the email address they make publicly available on their website you're already fighting an uphill battle. That email address is likely to be going through some form of spam filtering and if your email subject to this person has even a whiff of canned ham about it you'll be in that Trash Can quicker than you can say "$1million Ebay secrets".

So, what's the answer?

Well, for starters - don't be tempted to use software to do your links work for you. People like people. Not robots. Do your own dirty work. Also - try and find the name of the website owner and use that in your email to them.

One of the best ways to overcome the dreaded Delete Key when you are contacting website owners though is to use their online contact form. When they receive an email via the form they have on their website they know that a real, living, actual human being has filled it in and not some spam monster - hence - they're more likely to read it.

Good luck!