How to Correctly Make Contacts and Get Links From Other Sites

OK, no matter how good your content is, if no one can find it it is pretty useless.

Network, Network, Network

Research your area, depending on what your area is you will probably have a few of these:

Competitors
Potential Visitors
Dedicated Organisations
Internet Forums about your Area
Workgroups

The main idea here is to get your site out there, get involved in the forums, attend the workgroups, see what the benifits are of joining the organisation. Give your card out potential visitors (you do have a card don't you?). When it comes to competitors the advice is slightly different.

There are two types of competitors passive and aggressive. Passive competitors are sites that are in the same area as you but are in a different niche e.g. if you run a golfing store then a passive competitor might be a blog that discusses the products you sell. With these type of competitors, talk to them, discuss sponsorship (this works both ways, blogs seek it, companies give it), build a relationship. You will feed off each other and grow together.

Aggressive Competitors are a whole different kettle of fish and out of the scope of this guide (Believe it or not I don't know everything).

Link Out

If you find a resource on the web that your users might find interesting or useful then Link to it, it is that simple. Not only do you provide your users with useful content you might get a link back yourself, every decent website owner checks their statistics and referrers, if I see a referrer is sending me traffic I will always check out their site to see if there is anything there that my users might like.

By practicing the above you should start to build up relationships with other website owners, while these may start out as someone linking to you or you linking to them it is up to you to culture this relationship.

Why not send an email to them? Offer to write some guest content? Organise a shared event? There are so many oppurtunities to take advantage of, so why arn't you!?