You link to me, I link to you – that will bring us both more traffic. An easy thing to do, and it works – if it’s done right.
To just accept any request for a reciprocal link, no matter from where, is not the way to go. You need to keep the links to other sites in your own niche, so that they will not only provide your visitors with interesting places to visit, but also make your own site a valuable place to visit. The bonus is of course the traffic from the other sites, and that search engines will look at your site as more relevant – but keeping your links to relevant sites may also open for a closer cooperation with those sites.
All this is material for many articles, but the task of finding good sites with content related to your own, and then take contact with the owners and convince them to make a reciprocal link (and that you’re not just one of the spammers who tries this aimlessly) is a daunting task. Or is it? I just found a site – Links-For-You.com – that claims to make this task much easier, by arrange contact between serious participants interested in reciprocal linking within their own niches. It may work – I’ll have to look closer into it myself, too. 😉