Reciprocal Linking Wanted?

Do Webmasters Have Brains?

I got an interesting email yesterday, and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps the members here would like to see it, so I've included both the email I received, and my response to it:

Dear Webmaster,

My name is xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx, and I run the web site Simple Work From
Home Opportunity:

http://www.websitenamedeleted.com/

I recently found your site http://www.burningknife.com and am very
interested in exchanging links. I've gone ahead and posted a link to your
site, on this page:

http://www.websitenamedeleted.com/linkmachine/resources/resources_business_90.html

As you know, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising our search
rankings and generating more traffic to both of our sites. Please post a
link to my site as follows:

Title: Simple Work From Home Opportunity
URL: http://www.websitenamedeleted.com/
Description: A complete online money making system set up free!

Once you've posted the link, let me know the URL of the page that it's on,
by entering it in this form:

http://www.websitenamedeleted.com/linkmachine/resources/link_exchange.php?ua=_ua9&site_index=NjAxNDMzNDY%3D

You can also use that form to make changes to the text of the link to your
site, if you'd like.

Thank you very much,

xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx

At first, I was tempted to ignore the email - as I've received many such emails over the years - but I decided that perhaps I could benefit from this person's interest in gaining links... so I wrote the following response:

The most powerful form of links are those that are not on link pages with many other competing outgoing links, but text links that are included within surrounding text, with an appropriate anchor related to your website.

I have a current policy of allowing do-follow links for all members. If you'll merely provide a username and email address, you can become a member of http://www.burningknife.com, and start a blog. I'd suggest simply putting up an article of 250-500 words that describe something of interest to those that might find your site worth visiting. (You may already be writing articles for article directories - this would be a perfect use for such an article). By doing this, you'll have a link from my site that's far more valuable than the typical reciprocal links - as it would be a one-way link, and embedded in the middle of a webpage (Google likes such links!) - you've added something of value to my site (an interesting article), and both of us will benefit in far better ways than if I simply put up a text link on a page filled with hundreds of other text links.

Thankyou for your interest!

I think that perhaps I'll expand that reply into a tad more detail, and then save it as a template to use for any other such link requests. There's no reason to ask for a reciprocal link when the website is willing to give a one-way link for free! More importantly, not only a one-way link - but one that has your chosen anchor text.  For example, if I were writing this particular post as a guest blogger, and wanted to earn a really great link to my website, I'd tell you about how to make money with a website, and you'll notice that this sentence has a link in it with the anchor text "make money with a website".  This is one of the many anchor texts that I'm using to drive traffic to Burningknife - and it will help me move up in the SERP's for that term.

This webmaster who wrote me could have a far better, and much more valuable link ... without even asking me.  Simply by creating an account, and putting up a blog - they could have a valuable link, and one that had precisely the anchor text they wanted, for free!

By the way, I'm not impugning this particular webmaster with my title above - everyone starts off being ignorant - indeed, the list of things that  I'm ignorant of  must be legion. But if you want to make money with a website, it will pay to learn the ropes. And learning how to get links is critical to your success if you want to make money on the Internet.