Filling the links list at first.

[Simon]

Suggestion - look at some successful Link Lists and you'll see that you need more than just one catchall category called "Free Sites" to get submitters interested. SEO'd pages for each category would help.

Aside from that you need lots of good traffic hitting your LL pages to keep the regular submitters once you get them. If you think requiring recips will build any real traffic to your LL then you'll never have enough traffic to keep submitters coming back. You need to actively generate plenty of traffic to your LL pages or it'll just be a list of your own free sites.

You can also fill empty categories by asking for and importing lists of clean free sites that most submitters have. Once they see traffic coming to those sites from your LL pages they'll be more inclined to actually submit some sites themselves.

HTH