Building Links: Contacting Potential Link Partners

The reading level for this article is Novice

Note: This is an excerpt from the 37-page “Building Thousands of Links to Your Web Site.” You may download the full ebook here.

5. Contacting Potential Link Partners

The next step to building links is one of the most important. You need to contact owners of related web sites and ask for a link. You can do this via email, phone, fax, or in person if close to you. The most common way, at least initially, is via email.

A Warning about UCE

You must be careful in sending out email to potential link partners. They have not requested to receive email from you, so in the broadest interpretation it is unsolicited email. Why is this not unsolicited commercial email (UCE), also known as spam? Well, it might be seen this way if you are not careful.

The best reason for why it is not UCE is because you are not sending a commercial advertisement to a consumer who has not requested it, which really is spam. Rather, you are sending a joint venture request to a related business. Joint ventures are a very important part of business and as long as you are serious, have a professional site with some quality content, personalize your link request letter, and make sure your email only goes out to businesses or webmasters, you should receive very few complaints.

Now, let me repeat this in list form. By sending out unsolicited link request emails, you are at risk of being accused of sending unsolicited commercial email unless you do the following.

Now, even taking these precautions, you are still likely to receive a few UCE complaints. Simply send a quick and polite email apologizing and explaining you simply wished to do a joint venture with their web site and then leave it at that.

If you do this, you will most likely stop any complaints from reaching your ISP, who can terminate your Internet connection or blacklists, which can block your mail server. One or two complaints are most likely not going to get your Internet connection shutdown or you blacklisted. Ten or twenty complaints most likely will, however. I have once before received a warning from my cable modem provider on this issue. I thought it was all right to send a link exchange request to a web site owner as she had a related personal site and I honestly wanted to exchange links and benefit both of us. However, she did not see things this way and complained. From this experience, I would recommend that you only email sites with their own domain and not any sites listed with free space providers such as GeoCities or Angelfire.

We all receive UCE everyday and dislike it. It is a cause for much wasted time and wasted computing resources. Please do not send unsolicited commercial email. It is not good for your company or your reputation.

This said, email is one of the two most effective ways to build lots of links quickly. Here is a sample contact email.

Please do modify and personalize this email as this is just a standard cookie cutter format. Be different and standout, yet remain professional and succinct.

Also, do remember that a phone call is much more personal than an email. If there is a web site with quite a bit of traffic or traffic that is your exact target demographic, a phone call may be very worthwhile.

As an example of a modified and unique link letter than stands out from the masses of unsolicited emails web site owners receive each day, here is the link request letter I used for zeromillion.com with accompanying notes.

So now that you are well-versed in the methods of contact, how exactly do you find potential link partners? Continue on to the next section to find out.