Pardon me,

But you don't seem to understand the concept behind links. All of the template files go in your
/cgi-bin/links/admin/templates/
folder.

When you create a category a directory is created in your
mydomain/links/pages/
folder that is the name of your category,
thus if your category name is "cars" the index file with your links will reside in
mydomain/links/pages/cars/
and your template "cars.htm" will reside in the template folder as already stated.

Try reasoning this out before you proceed and you'll save yourself a lot of time.