Making Contact
The first challenge is often figuring out how to reach the site owner.
Look around the page for an e-mail address. If you don’t spot one, then seek out an “About” page or “Contact” page. Most sites will usually have these, and you can often find them when you visit the site’s home page. If you use Arelis it will find all the addresses on the site.
Be sure to carefully review all the contact options that may be available. You want to send your request to the most appropriate person possible. For example, some sites might list an e-mail address for their webmaster, editorial staff, their technical department, and their advertising department. In this case, it is probably the webmaster you’d want to reach. Sending to the ad department would probably cause your request to be ignored.
Some sites seem just plain unfriendly and offer no way to contact them except via a form. The webmasters who use a form have probably been abused by spam and e-mail harvesting robots, whose sole purpose is to find your email address to sell to marketers.
The best way to approach them is to fill out the contact form with your request. Many sites that exchange links will have a link request form on their site making it easy to request a link.
Be sure to follow all the instructions. If they ask for a link to be visible on your site first your better have one on your site where it can be found. You should always send them the exact URL of where the link is. Don’t send them to the index page of your link directory and make them dig to find their link.
They are busy people too and it shows your disrespect for their intelligence when you try to make them find a link just so you can get a few extra page hits. When I run into these jokers I delete their links and their requests. I also regularly delete requests from people who purposely add false information or bad email address.
Follow Up
“It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the oil.”
“If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
Both sayings above are true when it comes to link requests. If your initial attempt to get a link is unsuccessful, you need to follow up and try once more.
Using Arelis makes this task a breeze. Simply sort your database every two weeks, when the sites load up the original e-mail appears. You can add to it or make reference to it for your second request.
Wait a reasonable amount of time and politely follow up asking again whether a link request will be considered, including all the original information. This is easy using the mail merger features of Arelis.
