Offer your link partners incentives, have you tried?

[Yangtze]

There are so many websites and it seems that everyone is trying to build a directory and want ohers to join.

Even myself has built a directory related with my business. And now I am spending hours per day searching proper link partners, send link request, add links etc.

1)I am thinking about offer my potential link partners some inventives like script or ebooks.
Will this work?

2) At present, I have around 60 quality websites in my directory, I keep the webmasters' name, email, add-URL page in my database. I came up with an idea, can I offer something like " if you submit your widget related site into the proper category of my directory, once accepted, you will get, say, ten contact details the the exsiting websites in the directory"....
Is this practice illegal? (because it disclose partner information)

3) as it is very expensive to buy quality text links, could we trade the links with link partners? (if you give me ten contacts of webmasters in your directory, I give you ten...)

[martinibuster]

That's a bit aggressive to offer other the private information of other webmasters to potential link partners.
Why not offer them a spot on a rotating banner ad?

[edited by: martinibuster at 5:18 pm (utc) on Jan. 13, 2005]

[Yangtze]

I have not released my link partners' private information, I just feel it is not good

[eggypiece]

Yangtze,

I believe that if you were to release private information on your link partners you will soon find yourself looking at a directory with no inbound links, as your partners will delete your listing from their sites.

Also, in my case, I would not be motivated to join your directory by receiving the private info on 10 other listings--because I know that you would be releasing my info as well, and I wouldn't want that!

[chrisnrae]

I couldn't see this doing anything but hurting you - both from a new partner perspective and an old partner perspective.