What would make you link to someone without getting paid?

19 replies
It seems that most people expect some kind of payoff for sending their subscribers or website traffic to another person's website.

The thought of sending traffic to other people without monetary reward is becoming more and more rare.

But it happens, even today.

So my question to you is, what would make you want to link to someone's website without getting paid for it?

Here's some of my methods to kick off the discussion:

1. Incredible value that is unique to that person sending the traffic (value to their traffic and subscribers)

2. Some kind of award, and wanting to mention/show it off to their audience

....

So, what else could we do?
#link #make #paid
  • Profile picture of the author Mangozoom
    How about value by association i.e. I put a link on my site that makes everyone think I am really smart and in the know!
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  • Profile picture of the author Geoff101
    The Content of the resource will make me link to it for my visitors/subscribers, which is what Mangozoom pointed in another way.
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  • Profile picture of the author leclaims
    Hard to think of any excuse to link to another site without something in return other than the fact that the content you are linking to might be very valuable/informational to your customers.

    Providing customers or visitors with the information they are looking for, even if it is from another site, might get you some brownie points which could lead to monetary reward down the road.

    Just my 2 cents...
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    • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
      Banned
      There's also a kind of "karmic" sense in which this can just be a good thing to do. I sometimes do, if I just admire someone's site a lot.

      I admit that I do it more readily in my autoresponder messages than on my websites, but I've been known to do that, too.
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    • Profile picture of the author whyfrown
      hey guys , is it true that the more links that you have in a page , the less
      "powerful " each link will be? if so , then linking to someone would sacrifice the link power to other pages in your blog?
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      • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
        Banned
        Originally Posted by whyfrown View Post

        hey guys , is it true that the more links that you have in a page , the less
        "powerful " each link will be? if so , then linking to someone would sacrifice the link power to other pages in your blog?
        Yes, it's true. One of the comparatively few things with no ambiguity at all, because Google says so openly.

        (Unless you have no page-rank, in which case it probably doesn't make any difference, or no difference worth talking about, anyway).
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  • Profile picture of the author Andyhenry
    I happily send people to other sites I find interesting - or people I like that are doing something good.... nothing more required.... but it's never because they asked.
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    nothing to see here.

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  • Profile picture of the author Nick Brighton
    I guess so far, the general consensus is that high value is the key. Not really a surprise, and a good thing of course.

    I personally think that self interest is a powerful one. People love to show off. Anything that can incorporate or exploit that ethically is probably going to carry weight.
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    • Profile picture of the author Paul Hancox
      Hey Nick

      Originally Posted by Nick Brighton View Post

      I guess so far, the general consensus is that high value is the key. Not really a surprise, and a good thing of course.

      I personally think that self interest is a powerful one. People love to show off. Anything that can incorporate or exploit that ethically is probably going to carry weight.
      I'm a pretty sporadic blogger (read "I post waaaay less than I should"), but I've noticed that I tend to get specific attention when I mention specific people by name in my blog post (or on Twitter).

      I guess that goes back to the "self interest" thing. We* like to be flattered, to be noticed, to be seen as important. And then we like to tell others about it.

      * By "we", I mean everyone but myself. I'm above all that
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      • Profile picture of the author Nick Brighton
        Originally Posted by Dan C. Rinnert View Post


        Quality content. Interesting content. Humorous content. Entertaining content. Useful content. Etc.
        Good point. On a sidenote, I think that it's easy to forget that content doesn't always have to be the standard tips/how to stuff. Sometimes people just want to be entertained or have their minds opened a little.
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        • Profile picture of the author teatree
          I usually link out to others as citations.

          So, say I've found an interesting snippet on someone else's site that I want to quote and then discuss on my site, I usually put a do-follow link to the originating article, followed by the bit I'm quoting in quotes.

          I get a lot of citation links from other people too. It helps to have info on your site that isn't anywhere else, because people quote you, and give you a citation link back.

          P.S. As an example, I once got a link to a hubpage from cmswire, and it was a citation link because they were quoting something I had written. That one link was sufficient to give that hub a page rank 3 and about a thousand hits a month, without me doing anything further.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dan C. Rinnert
    Originally Posted by Nick Brighton View Post

    The thought of sending traffic to other people without monetary reward is becoming more and more rare.
    Maybe you need to step outside the IM niche once in a while?

    So my question to you is, what would make you want to link to someone's website without getting paid for it?
    Quality content. Interesting content. Humorous content. Entertaining content. Useful content. Etc.
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  • Profile picture of the author Paul Hancox
    And this also is a great reason why original, QUALITY content often trumps low quality, spun crap.

    Who's going to link to a badly written, spun article?

    Not a lot of people.

    Great, quality content... perhaps they will.
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  • Profile picture of the author sbucciarel
    Banned
    I've done it plenty of times

    When another site is giving away something I think my readers will like
    When another site has info I think my readers need
    When I want to show something funny or interesting (buzz)
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  • Profile picture of the author Colin Palfrey
    I do it all the time on various websites I own.

    The idea is to create a website/blog that is useful to the reader. If I find genuinely useful tips etc. I am happy to link to them. The reason is that the reader may find what they wanted to know on another website, but they remember my website was the place they found the link.

    It creates an association of value, because they went to my website/blog first, and were then provided with the information they needed.

    It is called the "web" after all, not the sink hole.
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    • Profile picture of the author Vogin
      I link to those who have information I want to provide to my readers, information that adds value to my own article.

      I don't know why the hell should I get paid for that, this is how backlinks should be done in the first place...
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  • Profile picture of the author Nick Brighton
    It's nice to hear that people do still link in the true nature of the web, despite so much affiliation going on these days. I guess there is a lot of worry that linking out to other sites will lose your business and chance of a sale.

    But that's irrelevant if you're sending an RSS subscriber or email sub to different sites. When it's a cold visitor, perhaps that loss is more damaging?
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    • Profile picture of the author skibbz
      Q: What would make you link to someone without getting paid?

      A: A good heart
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  • Profile picture of the author tryinhere
    for some of the work i do on adwords having a flow on a site tends to help / i have incoming but also a outwards flow, to do this i set up a resources page from there i can 3 main types of outwards links, one is i can link to the seach engines for the key / them of the site / this is easy to do my just taking a seach of the key and grabbing the resulting url /

    > google > dog training
    > bing > dog training

    Then you can have it is allows associated but non competitve links if you like them

    > dog grooming blog

    and last you can also use this bit of kit to link to information products in say clickbank or other shopping sites such as amazon

    > Better dog training tips
    > Popular dog toys

    My guess if they are on that page they must be looking for an out and all of these links leave the site / no open new window stuff on these links.

    works well for me /

    Resources - Please find a collection of popular links that will further assist you in your search for dog training. Thank you for visiting our site we appreciate you stopping by.
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