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Who doesnt need more links?

More links due to good content + good user experience/ creating value = bigger business.

"you are not interested in hiring anybody. " --  I mentioned that I have hired numerous quality SEO companies. Name someone that is really good here and I will tell if I have used them (or why I have not).

Yes, this site tends to attract the corporate SEO, so I may not get much here, but word-of-mouth has been useful to me in the past on this kind of thing.

I dont know what you mean by sponsorships, unless you mean as just a seo technique--yes, thats been used quite a bit. It is not scalable, and it is not cost-effective often. Unfortunately, you cant get 1000 links this way. I wouldnt not classify that as merit-based either. But thanks for the suggestion.

Basically, I am looking for new ideas for inbound link generation - WHITE-HAT (merit based links) for the car insurance vertical. E.g. Creating infographics, and promoting them to blogs/news sites.

To clarify, the other site is only linking to me because I have something they like about my site, and choose to link to it (so things like guest blogging and directories do not work here, at least in the conventional sense).

There are tons of seo blogs that give advice on how to get links, but either:

1. I have already tried, or hired someone, to do them. Those that I hire are specialists (I have hired lots of reputable companies that most people know here, but they always slow down after a few months/years in terms of link volume;

2. Many of the popular methods just don't work in my niche: Take for example one of the more recent ones:  skyscraper" method. I really dont think it works in my niche. It only works in niches where "information based content" is vary valuable, like SEO, not car insurance. It is also hard to scale this.

3. The link topics sometimes get too far off-topic. E.g. Links from travel websites is probably not going to work; even car topics can be off-topic wen they get too gimmicky.

So my idea is to start a contest here where I basically award the best link building idea $1000, $5000, or whatever amount that would get enough people participating. These ideas have to be relatively proven, and scalable. If it helps to know my background, I am very seasoned at SEO.

What do you think of this idea? How can I improve it? Has this been done before (I am not talking about a general SEO contest).

Good tool guys.

Basically, when I used to work at a software development company, we used to have a huge hosted app that had to import/export 10's of 1,000's of records, and at batch of 10,000  could be done in a few seconds. When exporting from OSE, it can take several minutes.

Thanks and keep up the good work. Look forward to when your database can catch up to Yahoo's old SiteExplorer (yes, I know they were a full on search engine but your one of the only decent alternatives, so guessing you're getting quite popular now