Method 1 - offer an incentive
If your product has an affiliate program, then you simply suggest that they promote your affiliate program on their site, and they will be able to get a commission for each sale for people coming from their site. Alternatively you can advertise on their site and pay a fixed fee.
Another type of incentive is to offer your product for free, or offer free advertising for their site on your site. There are several alternative ways to do this.
Method 2 - get the links for free
A great way to do this is to the following:
Firstly, look at the site and carefully determine if your product or site fits with the topic of their site. If it does, look for the best place for them to have a link to your site. Then, put a link to their site on your site - do this before they even put a link to your site.
Next you need to email them. Tell the site owner that you have put a link to their site (show them the page where you have put a link, and make sure it is a quality link). Then tell the owner why it will benefit their visitors to have a link to your site. Lastly, give an example of exactly where you suggest the link should be on their site, and an example of the wording that they could use. This make it really easy for them to link to you.
The potential problem with method 2 is that it can take a lot of time to find the best sites to link to you. There is some software which can do it for you which is the Internet Success Spider as mentioned above.
Other resources to help you
Before you even start doing all of this you should check and see how many links are already pointing to your site.
Other things that will dramatically increase your chances of getting "linked to"
Here are some other important things you can do:
1. Try faxing or phoning Website owners. Faxes receive a lot more attention than emails.
2. Make sure that your email (or fax) is individualized, and states the benefits for their site and their visitors.
3. Make sure that your site has good quality content that people are going to want to link to.
4. Make the email (or fax) personal. Use the webmaster's name if you can find it.
5. If the webmaster doesn't respond to your first email, try emailing again a week later as a gentle reminder. This can often work well.
6. Use a database to keep track of who you have emailed and their responses.
7. Create a template email that you can use to save time BUT don't send the same email to everyone, make sure that you individualize.
8. If you are sending out lots of emails you can use an emailing program such as Mailloop to individualize each email.
