It is necessary to consider the page rank of a link exchange partner. Do we need to choose with the same pr and related site. How about higher page rank and not related.Is this will increase the link popularity for the site?
Look for quality sites with unique content. If a webmaster took the time to develop the site...they will probably take the time to promote it as well. PR will come in time. Just to give you an example...I am adding new pages to my site all the time. I will approach quality sites once in a while and some will refuse to link to a particular page because it has no PageRank. Well no sh*t, I added it a few days ago. A month later the PageRank fairy came around and gave all my new pages a PR5 or PR4...and these are subpages.