How do you advertise your sites? I use a mixture of the two, but find paid ads to be more lucrative. What about you? MB
It depends on the competition for the terms you are optimizing for. There is no reason to purchase links for low competition phrases and high competition phrases wont be impacted too much by recip exchanges. Every link helps but if you are competitng against pages with thousands of high quality inbound links it would take eternity to exchange enough to compete. Especially if you are building for a long tail website.