Ideally you don't want to be in the position of having to email other webmasters asking if they're interested in reciprocal links. You want your website to be such that people will want to link to it, whether it be because of a cool feature, generous affiliate program, whatever. The problem is unless you have at least some sites linking to you you're not going to get noticed.

In short, if you have a fairly new website you're going to have to email other webmasters and ask if they're interested in reciprocal linking. So how to you go about finding suitable websites?

Here's one of the methods I use:

Let's say I created a website about killer whales. The first thing I do is a google search on killer whales.

Next I take the first website that's listed and do a google search on it's url. So if the first website's url is "www.allaboutkillerwhales.com" I would copy and paste that url into the google search box.

One of the nifty things about Google is that if you search on a url it'll give you an option of finding pages that link to that url. So continuing the example the above the next thing I do is click on "Find web pages that link to www.allaboutkillerwhales.com."

Now I have a list of urls that have links to a site about killer whales. I can email these sites and ask if they'd like to link to my site.

But it doesn't stop there. When I find a web page I can also use Google to find similar pages. These similar pages are likely to also be suitable candidates for reciprocal linking.

Finally I repeat the process above for other websites I found when I searched for "killer whales."