If so, what would a good link exchanging avenue be? Other advertising and/or co-op suggestions? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
No. they are not against Adsense TOS. But they may affect your Google PR negatively...I mean in terms of search engine results Spiritualghost
Google says not to participate in linking schemes that are aimed at artificially boosting your PageRank or for SEO specific purposes. Look for it in their webmaster guidelines page.
Thanks for the advice, i think i'll play TOS safe and stick with word of mouth and actual marketing rather than 'empty hits'.
A banner exchange is not a linking scheme, is not aimed at artificially boosting your PageRank or have any SEO purpose. The purpose of a banner exchange is to gain interested visitors to your web site, and in return you provide the ad space for other banner exchange members. You do not place a link on your web site, you place a an ad on your web page, and your ads are placed on other web pages. And the ad normally links to a script operated by the banner exchange owners, and not directly to the member web pages.
I dont know about a banner exchange, its link exchange we are talking about here. And its true that these link exchang programs help to artificially boost up ur google page rank!