Effective and creative ways of getting links

[indianboy]

There's a few people that know very effective or clever ways of getting good quality links. I'm probably an amateur at getting links. I'm sure there's got to be a few good techniques I'm not aware of or haven't thought of. So share them if you got them... here's a couple of my favorite methods.
1) When I send out a well written and personalized e-mail request for a link, I will often offer money or a link back. An e-mail with "Will pay or trade for a link" tends to get read more often than "link exchange request". So if the link is relevant, and if it's worth some amount of money to me, I will offer to pay for it. I get some great links this way on very relevant sites from site owners that don't normally "sell links" but are happy to have a few extra dollars for putting a relevant link on their site.
2) Hunting links: When I am searching for links I like to make good use of the search tools. For example, if I am searching for links from .edu or .gov sites, I will include site:edu in the search such as widgets site:edu . Each time I look at a site I will add it to my search in this format -siteialreadysaw.edu . This way I don't keep looking at the same sites each time I use a different search term or a different search engine. For example after searching for widgets site:edu -siteialreadysaw.edu -anothersiteisaw.edu -anothersiteiseen.edu (the list can get pretty long) I can change my search term to purple widgets and keep all of the advanced operators. I can also copy all of my advanced operators and paste it into the search bar of another search engine. This also helps keep me from looking at different subdomains of the same site. As you get more specific in your searches you tend to see alot of the same sites over and over so using advanced operators like this can speed up a process.