Sending Link exchange requests to other webmasters is one of the most effective ways to build link popularity for your website. Only focus on sending link requests to sites relevant to your website but not the direct competitors. Make sure to have something unique or appealing to attract other webmaster so that they link to your site.
Link exchange requests result in long term so it requires a lot of patience as after sending hundreds of link exchange requests often it takes weeks to receive responses from other webmasters and usually we get no more than 5% to 10% responses however it depends on your website and whom you sending requests also.
Quality matters a lot and not quantity so you should focus on getting quality links from authority websites, edu and gov sites and also focus on getting links from older websites and should avoid links from link farms and FFF pages.
Above tips will be useful to you, follow them and sure link popularity and traffic to your site will increase day by day