Asking dealers for links if they sell your products:

[kbloemendaal]

Should you ask your dealers for links back to you?

For example, if you are a laminate flooring manufacturer, should you ask all your retailers to link to you?

If so, how do you go about it? Emails? A form letter?

Should I create a page on the site for banners and let them grab the code?

Any creative ideas would help.

[kbloemendaal]

My client only sells to their dealers, not to the public. So, if I were a dealer, I would gladly link to the manufacturer who is working hard to provide better information about the products.

I am going to approach them about making a form letter to either mail out or email out and we can link them to a private page to get the badges.... see what happens.

I will most likely report my findings on SEOmoz

[AWCthreads]

If you're a manufacturer that sells products, I'm not going to link to you no matter how good your content and how many bells and whistles you've got for promotions. However, if you don't sell products and you've got better content than I can provide on my site, I will link to you. I link to manufacturer sites when they have authoritative information that is beyond the scope of information I provide. For example, flame resistant clothing or fire rating information. If I want to cover my bases (ass) and make sure the customer has access to deep level information that is beyond the scope of what is necessary for a purchase I will link to it on a case by case basis.

[EGOL]

What can you do for the dealers that will make this a situation where you, the dealer and the customer all win?

How about fantastic product support PDFs that they can post on their website which contain a link to the manufacturer.

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I think that you have a good opportunity here.  Putting myself in the position of your dealers... do you sell retail and compete against them?  If the answer is yes then your request for all of them to link to you might not be appreciated.

I am a dealer and none of my suppliers ask me to link to them.  Instead they are linking to me to support my efforts - even when I also sell their competitor's products.  They link to the page on my site that features their product.

[kbloemendaal]

I was thinking this would be a good source for linkbuilding since the dealers already usethe product and are dealers, they should want to show it off... I would think.

So, if there are 1,000 dealers and I could get half of them to link to the manufacturers site, that could be a nice boost for my linkbuilding efforts.

They are already dealers, so we don't need any affiliate tracking, but I guess I could track it in analytics to see how well it works too.

[bsofttech]

We did something similar to what you are asking for a client of ours that had a venue to promote. We set it up so that various customers could sign up as afilates and then place a custom link on their site. Everytime someone clicked on that link and came to the site and ordered tickets a small amount of the proceeds was kicked back to them.

You could possibly do something similiar but rather then money you could do some sort of top dealer program where you track incoming from each link on the retailers site and then either pay a small amount of money to the top 3 or rank them by Bronze, Silver and Gold and then send them certificates that they can display in their lobby at the end of the year. This would encourage them to link from more then one page and in more visible locations. I know your probably, mostly after the links but this would make it easier for them to swallow cause they would feel like they got more to gain.

Another thought would be to give the top three links off your home page.  Turn it into a bit of a competition. You  could change these links out each month based on the traffic that the retailers send back to you. If you used a small graphic as part of the link this would be great for promoting the brand and the competition would tend to push your link placement to the top of these retailers pages. That equals more brand recognition.

[A_Q]

You could create a nice badge for each retail website "Certified retailer of [...]".

The idea of having a page on your website with multiple types of badges would also be good, as the sites will be different so may need a different size/orientation of badge.By providing the code you also control the link text and the link destination to some extent.

The decision of whether to choose letter/email will really depend on the industry. I'd guess that if you're targeting the tech industry, they'd prefer an email...

I'm working on something similar at the moment - it's tricky! Good luck.