[WagerX]

I wanted to share my link building strategies so others may avoid my mistakes and perhaps recommend better ways of getting IBL's.
Here it goes.

(1) Bought links on Ebay.. very expensive, I averaged about 4$/mon and $6/mon for PR4, PR6 respectively. Expensive, and don't recommend it.

so then I tried:

(2) Outsourcing from >>getafreelancer.com. The idea was originally apealing because I thought I could get relavent IBL's for around $1 a link.. at least that's what was promised.. out of the 8 providers I tried.. the only one who came close cost me about $2.5/link.. a mix of PR1 to PR4. The forst 6 providers gave me nothing but grief. Poor guys were plagued with personal problems, and unforeseen circumstances. I literally spent about $3000 during the last 5 months on that approach.

(3) Exchanging links and buying from other forums.. less expensive than Ebay, but still the monthly charges are eating at my marketting budget. I'm not so sure what's more cost effective, higher monthly charges on higher quality sites, or permanent links from non-banned just ok sites. I won't mention theother forum because the last time I did on a post John replied with **** ridden reply.. lol..

(4) Manual link exchanges with other websites.. the hardest to do, but I devote time to finding good quality link exchange partners.. is it the most time and cost effective?.. I'm still not convinced. There's a lot of link exchange partners that removed my links after a few months.. or the reffered page was not linked from the home page or any other page (orphaned).. so every month I go and check my link exchange partners and remove about 5-10%..

(5) Automatic link exchange software ( I wrote myself).. simple but works ok, but same results as (4) with the exception that 99 out of 100 are not on topic.. so I decline to exchange links on most of them. I've been getting about 100 link exchange request a day 99 of them are spam ( I need to filter IPs).. One thing that is nice is that the program automatically checks the reciprical links for me and culls the dead ones. I recommend this, because reduces the tedious monkey brained act of looking them up..

(6) I bought an existing sports related forum (yea I know, already a stupid idea). It had over 50,000 posts and 5000 members.. and impresive daily page views.. great keywords for sports etc.. I purchased the forum thinking I was going to place a big fat juicy link to my main link builing program.. WagerX and WagerLineSports. Massive forum wide footerlinks that over time would compensate for the forum cost. Since I didn't do my homework, I didn't realized that the majority of the members are underage.. That is a significant deal, because i'm not so sure what the rules are on underage internet users.. I use common sense and don't place my gambling links (Like I originally wanted to).. I'm going to put adsense on it and see what happenns. Long story short.. most of the members soon went to another forum.. I guess I could not relate to them.. ohh well.. I really don't recommend buying a forum you know little about, and don't have the time to maintain. I thought it would be a lot easier than it was..... NOT

Conclusion?
I really don't have one.. I'm in the position that I feel that incomming links are important, but so far I haven't found the best way to get them. OR is this just the inherent reality behind being a webmaster?

What's the best way you guys have managed your link builing?