I wanted to try an experiment tonight and leverage a bit of the terrific community vibe and willingness to share we’ve got here at SEOmoz.
In the comments below, share your top 3 most bizarre, unique, unconventional, or simply unexpected link building tactics. They can be specific, broad, or even a little coy. The rest of us will go through and reward with thumbs up depending on how valuable we consider the techniques to be. Then, on Friday morning (the 4th), we’ll give the member who gets the most thumbs up in the comments a free one-week trial to SEOmoz PRO.
I’ll start with 6 of my favorite offbeat link building techniques (to help set the bar high) 
- 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, if not, the first 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 comments themselves are nofollowed (or don’t even allow hyperlinking), but even just the printed URL will get plenty of copy-and-paste traffic from big sites.
- Be on 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 (or a profile site).
Now let’s see who’s got the best 3 link building tactics out there…
p.s. Already have SEOmoz PRO membership? We’ll mail you a deck of SEOmoz Werewolf Cards or a t-shirt (as if thumbs themselves weren’t enough of an incentive).
p.p.s. Couple more rules – you can accumulate points for multiple posts, so if you post 3 comments, each with 3 link building tactics, we’ll combine the thumbs score (but subtract 2 points to compensate for extra thumbs up you give yourself). Also – in order for your comment below to be considered an entry it needs to actually contain 3 link building tactics, so we won’t count every comment.
