A compelling link request that I as a blogger want to act on is as rare as hen’s teeth. Nearly all the ones I get are complete garbage, like this one. When making a link request, these are the sorts of statements to avoid, as they will doom your request to the recipients Trash folder. I’ve included with each statement a hypothetical response from the intended recipient to give you a sense what they might be thinking as they delete your email in disgust…

Link Requester	Webmaster
“Hi, Let’s swap links!” (or similar)	“I’d like to swap links with you as much as I’d like to swap STDs.”
“I’ve already linked to you and here’s the location…” or similar	“Yeah, whatever. So you bought a $99 link spam robot that created ‘link farm’ pages and your evil little tool will undoubtedly remove my link several weeks later after I’ve forgotten about you.”
“Great site!”, “Loved your site!” and other catchall statements that could apply to anybody	“It’s obvious you didn’t even bother to look at my site before emailing me.”
“You already link to our competitor XYZ.com and we offer a better product.” or similar	“Yeah, that’s what they all say!”
“Please use the following text in your link…”	“Can you be any more obvious that you’re trying to manipulate the search engines? I’ll use whatever damned anchor text I choose that’s in the best interest of my users.”