Letter/phone - approaching a company

approaching a company for a link - help

[GeddyLeeRocks]

I have done a lot of research on the companies we want to approach a linking campaign with. I have narrowed a huge list down to a managable sum. Now it is almost time to approach these folks.., I am getting a little nervous to tell you the truth.
I have a coworker that is helping me with a generic letter that we will then customize to each company. Does anyone have experience with this? what should I do and not do in this letter/phone call? I guess the worst that can happen is that they'll say no but I would like to gather as many companies as possible. Does anyone know where I can find a sample letter of interest? Any help is appreciated

[leppjc]

First before even starting, qualify your audience - does the intended website even do links to outside websites? Why, why, why do I get so many link requests when a 10 second review of our corporate site shows we don't do links? (Oh - they are auto-generated spam requests ...)

If you are looking for high quality site links, don't do a generic letter. Write a letter that you would consider agreeing to link your website to.

[GeddyLeeRocks]

Its good advice to write a letter as if I were receiving it. Theses sites are reputable sites, in our field or closely related, as we are- and not only link. We would both benefit from a link I believe. The letter we do send will be customized to a person and hopefully won't be considered spam.
I am really looking for an outline - that someone may have - having sent a letter to someone like this in the past

[aramyus]

Although I have not fully tried it, I would consider phone calls very seriously.

You have invested a lot of time in pre-selecting suitable partners and analyzing their sites, so you should have a limited number of phone calls to place.

I have read a few articles or posts about link exchange by phone and they were very convincing.

If the potential link partner does not have a link page, it probably is even more appropriate to call him. Chances are high that you get a real partnership rather than a link exchange on link pages that has less and less value.

In my own experience, each time I have called link partners, it has resulted in further cooperation such as content exchange, mutual contextual linking, traffic exchange or affiliations.

I also think that calling is about the only way to get noticed by authority web sites that are essential to your ranking.

It is also worthwhile to call a link partner after you have exchanged an email.

Like you, I have a process to carefully select potential link partners and I found that emails requests were very desapointing. I have only 20% success rate, and I am convinced that with my stringent selection criteria I should have over 50%-70% success rate.

My conclusion is that people have no time to read my emails, or to handle the requests. I fear it will be about the same if not worse with letters.

I'd be much interested to get your feed back and exchange experiences with you or others. Please PM me or post a reply.