Does Simply Asking People To Link To You Work?

I know this might sound kind of elementary...but does anyone do things like call someone up who's in your industry and ask them to link to your site?

For example...if you were in real estate and wanted to rank for "Detroit Homes" in the organic results, couldn't you build a Detroit Homes blog and then physically call up real estate agents from across the nation and ask them to link to it?

I'm guessing that it would be best to get links with prime anchor text from the pages of real estate agents who are in the city you are targeting and which have high page rank. I'm also thinking that physical location of the agent from whom you score the inbound link isn't really that huge of an issue as compared to whether or not their site is passing authority, trust, and PR to you.

Might it be possible to make 10 calls per day and get 3 homepage or sitewide links back for your effort? Might be a more effective than trying to use all the fancy tools here to get links...and the quality would be great.

Is this not an effective way to get higher quality links or are people not very receptive to such things? Would a giftcard to starbucks possibly boost positive response from the prospect?

Asking for links still works. If you can actually reach a real person (many sites don't provide real contact info, and whois is rarely accurate), then building a relationship with someone and eventually asking them for a link still works.

Many times, though, you will still run into someone who will want payment for a link when you ask them.

It still works, it's probably the most effective white hat method to get backlinks.

Michiganmaniac,

As the other members have mentioned, yes this works. In fact, this is one of the best ways to get some really high quality links. Especially if you can get people to agree on placement and anchor text. Its even better if you can collaborate on content with another business.

Best,

Shawn