Something for free, with value, and repeatable.

[NickCoons]

A lot of people have asked for different methods and techniques of acquiring links. One of the answers has been to offer something of value, but I haven't seen too much elaboration on that (maybe it's here and I missed it), but I thought I'd try to elaborate on it a bit.

First off, this strategy has worked extremely well for Adobe. There are thousands of sites out there with the "Get Acrobat Reader" button pointing right to Adobe's website, giving them a TBPR of 10. We can argue the importance of TBPR all we want, but I wouldn't complain about having a 10 :-).

So I started doing something similar. Obviously not on a scale quite as large, but I thought offering something that would encourage people to put something on their site that happened to link to me would be a good thing.

I run an informational site about a particular region. On that site, I also have current weather information about that region. So I created a cute little dynamic button that shows the current weather information. Someone can come to my site, choose their city, colors, and size, and the HTML code is generated for them on-the-fly to add to their site which will query my server for the needed info and generate the button on their page.

This button not only provides a link back to my site, but it also logs into a database every time it's requested. This database entry keeps track of the site it was called from (through the referrer, not an ID.. so it's not 100% accurate because some referrers are mangled, but it also can't be altered by the site owner). The nice thing about this is I can keep an eye on where the button exists, and check to see that those sites use the code in compliance. For instance, to make they haven't stripped the link off of the button and using the button without linking. And if they do, I can also create a custom "this image is stolen" image to display on their site only, or disable it in some other way.

I've noticed this working out fairly well.. some people that don't even run websites have gotten the code and are using it in the signature lines of posts they create on forums, so it gets other use that I hadn't even considered.

I know the weather button idea isn't new, other people have done it. But this particular one offers something a little different.

What have others done that can be offered to sites that will gain links?

[jorj]

Intresting aproach. Actually these things are not new but is kind of pleasant to read a real implementation about it. It makes me think to convert my little image-based counter to something similar. It's already working for unlimited sites and behaves pretty much as yours (logging, statistics, etc).

Thanks for sharing it with us