• Multi-Tier Program: Create the program not just 2-tier, but multi-tier. Let’s say you offer 20% commission on sales that they make. You then offer 20% commission of any referrals commission. And 20% commission off the commission of the commision your referral made, by referring someone else. It sounds good enough to warrant aggressive promoting(via forum sigs and others) by many. The way it breaks down is this.
  1st Tier Sale: 20%
  2nd Tier Sale: 4%
  3rd Tier Sale: .8%
  4th Tier Sale:.16%
  So the most you could ever, realistically pay is 25% commission. And that would require what? 5 levels? And in exchange, you garner enough links from various affiliates that you’re almost impossible for them to outrank, AND they’re doing your promotion for you.

• Site Cloning
  Have one site be your multi-tier affiliate program. Promote that via directories and sigs. After that, create clone sites of your multi-tier affiliate program (have all of them be separate affiliate accounts of your site). Submit them to the different affiliate program directories and affiliate generation companies (Linkshare, CJ, ShareASale.com, etc.). That gives you access to as many affiliates as possible, without breaking the rules about having more than one affiliate manager per store.

• Whenever you make use of several vendors in an industry or have a depth of experience with them, create a blog post, article or content page with a list of your "favorites" ranked in a particular order, then email each of the mentioned sites and tell them that they're welcome to use a "testimonial" quote you've written about them and also link to the "rankings" page. Companies love to link to anything ego-boosting.

• Have a quick trigger finger on popular news sites that allow comments and try to be one of the first to comment and mention a URL on your site that better explains your point or offers more insight. This works particularly well with politically focused stories. The only caveat is that you need a repository of relevant material to draw on. Also note - if your URL is long, you can use tinyurl.com for this purpose (which also creates a sense of mystery as to what you might be linking to). The printed URL will get plenty of copy-and-paste traffic from big sites.

• Be one of the first users of a given social network, and make sure to mention or include your URL in either your username or your account profile. Frequently, new services will blog about who joined them just after launch.

• Embed popular media with your brand in hilariously irresistible ways - Rick Astley + your logo doing karaoke FTW! Check out Shoemoney's genius McLovin ID cards as an example.

• Every time you send out a new customer email, send a snippet of code they can paste into the "partners" section of their website that will display your logo and a link back to your site (this works particularly well for B2B companies who like to show off their "partnerships").

• Create a wallpaper and screensaver with your company's brand and submit it to all the free wallpaper/screensaver galleries. The vast majority allow you to link back to your original source.

• DO give as much away as possible - If you’re a designer, create WordPress, Mediawiki, Joomla, Drupal, Pligg and other highly authoritative CMS solution themes. If you are a programmer/know a bit about how to code some cool gadgets/widgets, make a Firefox plugin, make Facebook Applications and iPhone applications. There are also various open source scripts and apps out there you may put your name on. There are the Firefox plugins and themes of course, but have you thought of Thunderbird plugins, SalesForce/vTiger/SugarCRM plugins, Feedburner add-ons, Del.icio.us Add-ons and creating API-related widgets/tools?.

• Submit guest posts at other blogs and network within the community of your niche - Look at Engadget and the WebLogs, Inc. blog empire. Build up a lot of bad authors, slap on a brand with a whole lot of link building and networking = high advertising revenues and exponentially increasing levels of revenue.

• Exploiting eBay for Traffic - Figure out a legitimate way to auction something that actually promotes your site. Have a gift certificate or store credit, or a sample product of some sort / lists of tips, etc. The second step is to get people to find your auctions. Use the eBay Marketing article for ideas...
  

• Promoting your website on the P2P File Sharing Networks -- You can name it "Complete_Guide_To_SEO.mp3" or "Top_10_Secrets_to_SEM.mp3". People will be searching using keywords, so you must try and incorporate those keywords into your title. (Get a list of all P2P Networks & just get your site names EVERYWHERE

• Become an Expert (Yahoo Experts (http://experts.yahoo.com), AskMe (http://www.askme.com), ABuzz - New York Times (http://www.abuzz.com), AllExperts (http://www.allexperts.com).

• Free "Radio" Advertising... Online Submit your music requests on behalf of your URL once to several times per day. For a pretty comprehensive listing of stations on the internet, visit http://www.internetradiolist.com/. Get your URL out there as having the song requested by the staff of yourdomain.com

• An Interesting "Twist" on Message Board Posting (Stories on Publicly Traded Companies) Have an article or idea on your site, that relates even indirectly to the operations of an important publicly-traded company, you can post a brief note, including the page's URL, to the Yahoo! Finance/Google Finance message board under their ticker symbol. You can also post this to Raging Bull.

• Get interviewed on podcasts, the radio, TV and various venues including print and web content. -- Get as many links as possible from these sources

• Exploit the Corporate PR Agencies and PR depts. - All major corporations have PR people devoted to combing the web for positive (and negative) mentions of their company. Most of their web sites have press centers or press rooms. If you target large, reputable companies, you can incredibly increase your PR. Just have the content on your site to support this affluent traffic. Publish book reviews, product reviews, etc. --> Manufacturers, software companies, authors and publishers will generally consider posting a link to positive reviews.

• Courtesy Website Reviews Visit & critique a few of the sites these sites have listed for review, and then submit your own URL to be reviewed. http://www.coder.com/, http://www.critics-corner.com/, http://www.siteownersforums.com/. Followed by this tactic, you should visit the webmaster forums and review sites in exchange for even more reviews of your site. The DigtialPoint forums are excellent for this as well as Sitepoint and all other forums dedicated to Webmasters.

• The eBay Leveraging Idea - The main idea: objects that get LOTS of attention on eBay: original Van Goghs, Lambourghinis, Paris Hilton/Celebrity memorabilia, houses in the most elite places in the world, etc. -- If you know someone who owns a Ferrari or any of the above item(s), hit him/her up (you could possibly even place ads of products you don't own, for the products would NEVER sell - their only purpose would be publicity). He/she would likely let you try to auction it on eBay if you set the reserve at, say $1,000,000. You could then place your URL in the image prominently so as to gain more traffic

• Make your audience into Superstars -- Start by doing profiles of the other webmasters and sites in your niche -- Also, do biographies and profiles on the BIG names in the media in order to influence even larger people -- Can anyone say, fan site networks solely created for links?
  
• Make’em laugh. Hire a comedian to do a great Youtube video. GIGMasters or Entertainment Unlimited may be a good place to look for someone. (This is in attribution to Trafficology.com)
  
• Give testimonials - If you have a favorite software solution you use or you love someone's product/service, contact them, they will love to have a testimonial from you on their site (with a link back to your site of course). You can also do this for content developer sites who post great content and put up great information for their users.

• Wear your URL on your t-shirt. Walk or drive your car around with an ad displaying your URL.

• Try the Traffic Exchanges

• Introducing the "Geographical" affiliate program - When a customer orders, the affiliate who "owns" that geographical area will automatically be credited with the sale.

• Baggage Claim Carousels - Buy a bunch of cheap suitcases and print each one (front and back) with marketing and promotional messages. Then they dragged these suitcases to the airport (in a city hosting a major investing conference) and loaded these "moving billboards" onto the baggage claim carousels.

• Exploiting eBay for Traffic - Figure out a legitimate way to auction something that actually promotes your site. Have a gift certificate or store credit, or a sample product of some sort / lists of tips, etc. The second step is to get people to find your auctions. Use the eBay Marketing article for ideas...

• "Objectively" Hyping Your Site, Affiliate Program, etc. The creation of sites specifically designed to appear to be objective directories or product-review sites in order to "plug" whatever it is you're offering. Make the case - by using charts, a top 10 list, etc. Implement a voting system for users to vote for their favorite eBook, affiliate program, or site.

• SigFile and P.S. Space of "Professional Forwarders" going through your emails and finding people who are prolific emailers and who are NOT using P.S.'s or SigFiles in their emails. Consider posting advertisements for this on some of the various online classified and money-making sites. Start with your own inbound emails, then try Paid-to-Surf message boards, Lottery message boards, free classified ad sites and chatrooms.

• Guerilla Auto-responder Marketing One of the ways to take advantage of this method is to set up an autoresponder with your marketing message and then DISTRIBUTE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS EVERYWHERE. Everybody who tries to send you email will get hit with YOUR marketing message. You can place your email address in classified ads, on message boards, in ffa links, etc. You can use the email address to respond to offers and ask questions.

• Exit Exchange When a user visits your site, a fairly unobtrusive pop-under is spawned. For every 2 popups you host, your website is popped-up once on some other member's site. On hit counter sites that rank your website according to the traffic it gets (like Hitbox.com for example), this would be an excellent way of moving up in the rankings.

• Third-Party Newsletter Creation Still, there are literally hundreds of thousands of online businesses that do not have a newsletter or any mechanism for contacting its customers on a regular basis. By offering to provide this service for them... free of charge, you'll be able to piggyback your own material and your own offers as long as you want. First, you'll have to prove that you can provide the goods. Go to one of these free content sites and simply compile a newsletter containing the appropriate articles --> Find a zillion more by using the search term "free newsletter content" on any search engine. Then, offer your proposal to as many non-newsletter-publishing companies as you can find. They will then start promoting YOUR newsletter to their customers.

• Free "Radio" Advertising... Online Submit your music requests on behalf of your URL once to several times per day. For a pretty comprehensive listing of stations on the internet, visit http://www.internetradiolist.com/. Get your URL out there as having the song requested by the staff of SoandSo.com

• Using your URL as your "User Name" Go to a game site, like pogo.com, for example, and sign up for their games service. Use the url of your site as your screenname. Better is the bingo game at uproar.com. You sign up again as wwwimarketinggurucom and play the bingo game. Do this on auction sites, message boards, chat rooms, instant messaging, email addresses, etc.

• Getting on Yahoo's "Full Coverage" Yahoo has "Full Coverage" pages on hundreds of news topics. And, under those topics, they list useful sites. Find the appropriate Full Coverage area - for example “http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/Tech/AOL/” - and then click on the link "Submit Links to Full Coverage."

• A Unique Net Radio Idea Live365.com is a website that will give you a free internet broadcast radio station, which you can then promote in various ways. Each "station" you create at Live365.com is given its own webpage that you may edit by adding popunders and popups in order to earn credit on various exit exchanges. Every time someone clicks on the link to listen to your station, it will automatically bring up your station's website (A TV Marketing, Radio Marketing and Movie Marketing article will exist soon). Now begin submitting your station to various radio station directories. The submitter's favorite place to submit is MSN. Get the station listed at Real.com. http://realguide.real.com/tuner/

• Get interviewed on podcasts, the radio, TV and various venues including print and web content.

• Text Message Marketing on Wireless Devices By offering free SMS messaging from your website, you could gain not only visitors, but also gain valuable profile data on your users. All his marketing consists of is a single tag-line at the end of each SMS: "Free SMS: oursite.com".

• Alexa Reviews Submitting substantive reviews of high-traffic sites...which contain your URL

• Exploiting Parasite Hosts with The Sub-domain being yours - Visit Jim Reardon's http://www.freecenter.com/ for free homepage providers (List coming soon).

• Courtesy Website Reviews Visit & critique at least 3 of the sites they have listed for review, and then submit your own URL to be reviewed. http://www.coder.com/, http://www.critics-corner.com/, http://www.siteownersforums.com/

• Become an Online Instructor Create an online course at UniversalClass.com.

• Partnering with Sellers on eBay Set up a simple affiliate program. Next, approach some of these sellers with the following proposition..."I see that you occasionally sell car parts on eBay. I've got an idea on how you can make a little extra money on each part you sell. My company produces auto repair manuals, and we convert about 4% of visitors into buyers. We get $40 per manual and we pay $20 commission on each sale. If you'll include a simple hand-written note with each part you sell, we'll give you credit for every order that comes from your customers... etc." But by using something like http://www.yourdomain.com/rt2.html (not clickable) you can make that page a simple redirect to the "real" affiliate URL. Of course, each one of your eBay sellers will get their own special redirect page so that you can track them appropriately.

• Signing Guestbooks Boosts Link Popularity Go to google and find as many personal guestbooks as possible. Sign as many high-popularity guestbooks as possible and include your URL.

• Marketing Through Personal Ads/Dating You would enter all your personal details in various "personals" sites, like...http://www.match.com/, http://www.oneandonly.com/, http://www.mingles.com/, http://www.cyberdating.net/ .... there's about a million of them! And then you'd include a line in your "ad" like this: "I develop websites; My most recent one is {Your Website}." Use an attractive picture/fake attractive picture / numerous pictures, and write an excerpt that will catch peoples' interest.

• The eBay Feedback Trick From now on I'm going to include my URL in every positive feedback I leave for someone after the transaction. For example: "Great buyer prompt payment! {URL}". To get the biggest bang for your buck, bid on all the $0.01 auctions on eBay.

• Write Your Own FAQs for Other Sites

• Syndicate your site newsletter and then build a list of RSS subscribers

• If our website shortcut now appears on your prospect's desktop, visitors choose to take the path of least resistance. Download it at http://www.returnvisitor.com

• SEO Should Be Used On Multiple 'Feeder' Pages And Not On The Main Site That Is Setup To Sell

• Have a site that allows hosting of online classes and universities freely (The Ning of online Classes)

• Submit the links that are connected to your site that don’t show up on Google by copying the links and submitting each link.

• Contact the marketers that are using the PPCs for the most expensive keywords and JV with these people so as to make more money and get the top ranking PPCs and organic results giving my product the most credit -- Contact the PPC buyers & the Organic Results listings to get them both to JV with you

• Create stars out of your audience. Start by doing profiles/biographies of the other webmasters and sites in your niche.

• Hosting a blog carnival, or to a lesser extent just joining in on one of dozens already in your niche

• Start by building e-profiles on authority domains such as MySpace, Squidoo, AboutUs, WordPress, Blogger, MSN Spaces, TypePad, Newsvine, LinkedIn, eCademy, Wikipedia, business networking sites, etc.

• Learn from the best. Compare yourself to established leaders such as Apple, Amazon and Google. Make the sites’ user experiences just like these sites

• Always carry business cards. Get Moo’s Skype cards for a fun and different way to stand out.

• Use your webcam. Use your webcam to run a small competition. Make your webcam publicly available and then hold up a code or phrase that participants must send in to you. Do contests, trivia, games, etc.

• Create T-Shirts making fun of my sites/me and competitor brands.

• Simply email other bloggers in your niche and ask them to review your service.

• Design one type of every product on CafePress and give away for free / sell after buzz is built (i.e. Posters, Clocks, T-Shirts, Hoodies, etc.)

• Bookmarks. Print up some bookmarks and set up a stack at local coffee houses, bookstores, libraries, and any other place that your audience is likely to be.

• Sponsor a local sports team and local events.

• Make’em laugh. Hire a local comedian to do a schtick for a Youtube video. A service like GIGMasters or Entertainment Unlimited may be a good place to look for someone.

• Find sites that are about your topic in general but are missing pertinent information that you provide on your site or that you can create an angle to merge with their topic and email the webmaster with a personal email that notes things about their site only a human visitor would and explain why you think linking to your content would benefit their readers.

• Awards for you and other sites (Setup the Top SEO Awards for iCluck) - You can submit your web site to sites who offer awards. If they reward you their award, then they'll probably link to your site. Just search Google for "awards directory your-keyword". You can also offer an award for other web sites. Submit your awards page to the above-mentioned awards directories to make it popular. The web sites who receive your award(s) as well as the runner-ups will link back to your site.

• Make cartoons about your company or about your industry and place your URL alll over the videos sent out. Cartoons and viral videos are the ultimate traffic drivers on the web.

Black-Hat Link-Building

The following information is from Quadzilla's blog and the Syndk8 forums:

1. Roll to Conferences with your digital camera and some super Hot Rent-a-Sluts.
2. Hook people up with coke.
3. Get a picture of a Journalist in a “compromising position” and tell them they either link to you or the dirt goes public.
4. Can’t get the scoop on anything before everyone and their dog has blogged about it? Then make some stuff up. The crazier it is the better.
5. College kids are always short on cash and can often make blogs or web pages on juicy .edu domains.
6. Hack other people’s websites

Game part of the top 100 with a page that you made up (i.e - http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?ns=articles&limit=100&month=08%2F2006&wiki=enwiki)

Got yourself or your company a great profile in wikipedia? If someone can create a less than favorable “body of work” externally, and if they are articulate and careful enough they can insert some neutral point of view criticisms citing that critical mass of negative work. It’s especially helpful if the profile making those criticism’s has a history of doing good things, like deleting spam and removing vandalism (of course lots of wikipedians won’t ever consider you created that spam and vandalism with another disposable sock puppet account to make yourself look good).

Get more out of Yahoo Answers, again running sock puppet accounts to ask questions you have the perfect answer for is so easy everyone thinks of it. Using sock puppets to “rig” the voting and get your answers voted the best is slightly more sophisticated; How about using RSS to “stalk” some keywords or phrases, giving you laser targeting on your question, answering and voting methods.

More Black-Hat Link-Building methods will be added here based upon the Forums

Find Good Mini-Hub Sites and Get Links

One strategy for finding relevant links is to look up "+links +fashion" or "+directory +fashion design".

1. Combine two or more key generic words (related to your theme) with a specific keyword. For example...+instrument repair" +guitar +Fender +acoustic +electric
2. Try synonyms (i.e., words that have the same general meaning) of your specific keywords = Thesaurus
3. Search for "links" and "listing" together. For example... +"penny stocks" +directory +list +links.
4. Search for +"submit URL" +"Specific Keyword" or +"submit button" +"Specific Keyword" (i.e., these are the words that would appear on the submission page of topical hubs).

"Specific keyword" + "add url" 
"Specific keyword" + "suggest a site" 
"Specific keyword" + "submit a site" 
"Specific keyword" + "reciprocal links" 
"Specific keyword" + "link exchange"

Bow-Tie Theory

Reciprocal Links

Google Directory Listing for Link Exchanges

Under Test: 8,206 links for a monthly fee, Link Exchange Market and Automated Linking Network (I will also find other examples of tools such as these)

Cool Ideas

Start building links by focusing on your market. Remember the importance of your link neighborhood, and build links strategically with that in mind. Nearly every imaginable topic is being discussed on the web; there are centers of influence, there are bloggers, there are directories and mailing lists and forums and social sites. Find where people are talking about your market, and enter the discussion through channels such as:

• Hubs: use Aaron Wall’s fantastic Hub Finder tool to locate topically-relevant pages through co-citation. It’s free and it rocks.
• Forums: perform searches like this one at Google to find forums in your niche.
• Authority Sites: perform searches like this one to find authority link sources. Use different words for targets along with your key phrase, and substitute the site: portion with other TLDs:

  "keywords" [library] [resources] [sites] [links] site:[.mil] [.us] [.gov] [.edu]

• Social Media: in addition to performing search variations of the above examples, you can use well-researched lists like this one on 48 social news sites and this one with 40 niche social media sites. You should also consider joining SEOmoz.org where a premium membership gives you access to an excellent directory of over 100 social media sites by topic.
• Email Lists: email discussion lists represent a wealth of largely untapped link building potential. There are lots of good potential sources, just take care to approach these with the community in mind first and your link drop second. Sources like this one, and this one, and this one should sufficiently whet your appetite.
• Blogs: By posting on high-traffic and influential blogs, you are getting in front of many people and contributing to the discussion. If you provide something of value, visitors (and the blog owner) will most definitely visit your site to check you out. Do it repeatedly and you’ll begin to create a reputation for yourself which could lead to business opportunities. And of course there are lots of dofollow blogs online, just do a simple search to find them.
• Directories: Good directories to use include Yahoo!, Business.com, Best of the Web, DMOZ, and Starting Point. There are myriad niche directories as well, do creative searching to find them.
• News Sites: news is one of the pillars of online content, and has several advantages for publishers, including wide adoption of syndication. Online press releases are a good idea, use them. In the meantime, no one knows it better than Lee Odden.
• Human-Powered Search: human-powered search engines are sites like Mahalo, Bessed, and ChaCha where human beings are assimilating tightly focused, topical pages. If the human-powered search site is valuable and the link category is competitive, it’s going to take high-quality or even exceptional content to get listed.

Build Links Strategically