Expert SEO users, what is your link building setup?
Those who work with high-value clients, Do you rely a lot on existing relationships with publishers? Or do you rely mostly on skyscraper technique and guest posting? Also how important is it for you to have a team for outreach? 51 💬🗨
BeBennyBe I wouldn't say we have 'high value clients' of sorts but we do have hundreds of clients. Relationships are good to have for the conversational value and it gives wiggle room when pitching ideas. It also helps knowing which person at a publication is the right person to contact. Our main focus is building shareable content and pitching it to press. Yes we have around 500 clients but the majority are less than 4 hours a month, so as you can expect, we can't build good content AND pitch to press in 4 hours, that's why we rely on guest posting for those clients. As it stands, we don't have a team for outreach. Every team member does their own outreach but some more than others. I'm the black sheep in a sense that I just do outreach, no other responsibilities. This is the only place I've worked at so I can't compare it to any other
scubyduby ✍️ Yes, creative outreach is a huge differentiator in this business. What are some of your key strategies to come up with shareable topics?
BeBennyBe Literally just go on twitter/Google news and search for stuff. A lot of our stuff is newsjacking (so building content around a recent news story). There are some evergreen topics like politics and gender which journalists will always want to cover scubyduby ✍️ What is your typical conversion rate for blogger outreach? BeBennyBe 0 We don't go out to bloggers, only publications. But we aim to get 1 link per hour of outreach scubyduby ✍️ How much do you charge per link? BeBennyBe We don't charge per link, we charge on an hourly basis – I don't know our rate though animalsarebetter What sort of content are you pitching? Infographics? Blog posts? BeBennyBe We used to pitch a lot of infographics but not anymore, they work for some but are quite outdated. Obviously guest posts are guest posts. But we do a load of data pieces and they do quite well animalsarebetter I've been wanting to try data pitching but not sure how best to showcase when it's not proprietary data. Would love to learn some of your best practices if you're open to it!
jakeinmn I manage 30 clients. I have a software we wrote that does it all for us. It takes an hour per client to setup once, as its mostly research, and it just collects replies via email. After a week and $100 of hunter.io and moz Application Programming Interface (API) credits get used, I get about 20 to 30 replies. We send the content outlines to our writers, and when they're done they email it to the guest post opp. They don't need to check and follow up to bug them – all of this is done with Lemlist to automate the emails. This takes 2 minutes for us to copy and paste for different niches. $2/hr Virtual Assistants (VA)s do 99% of the work, I may need to get in it to negotiate if its a great opporunity. I now assist SEO firms on setting this entire thing up for a cost. Its easy for anyone to run – its on Python. It scrapes guest post opporunities and automatically sends them emails – we only deal with replies.
landofcheeseandhoney How many links a month do you shoot for?
jakeinmn Hunter.io and Moz API give 2500 free credits every week. For high demand posts I e. For attorneys or Certified Public Accountants (CPA)s, you'd expect 2x more replies for a b2b blog than building links for joe the plumber. I aim for as many I can get. If the company is trustworthy I'll get 10 links a week on a budget of 99$week+40/moa unlimited email server like lemlist or woodpecker. I let people swipe our templates, asana, negotiating scripts, and help run it for them if they're busy.
scubyduby ✍️ Do you have some social proof or testimonials? I mean people spend thousands of hours on outreach and if this thing is so effective why has it not disrupted the market yet? Also if you are using MOZ for link data, isn't it terrible? What do you use Moz API for exactly?
jakeinmn Yeah, results are on my site, just check my post history. I don't like to advertise on Reddit, just PM me and I'll send a link.
tejas3732 So I will try to explain mine. I work with a famous Fintech Company based out in the US. Our Domain Authority (DA), Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) is nearly 87. We do multiple link building strategies. Here's a list:- • Competitor Link Building • Normal Outreach ( Where we just ask webmasters to insert our link, either link addition or link replacement) • Natural Links ( Links that we don't put efforts in. They just come naturally) • Guest Posting ( not too much because of a time investment) • Broken Link Building • Unlinked Mentions • No Social Bookmarking or submission stuff ( Pure white hat strategies) • We are going to try Crowdfunding link building as well in 2021.
scubyduby ✍️ Which strategy brings the highest Return of Investment (RoI)?
tejas3732 Link Addition
Phantai A combination of: A) High quality Private Blog Network (PBN) for a specific niche (20 – 30 websites with strong content and organic traffic) B) Existing relationships with about 200~ publishers in the niche (granted, these are financial arrangements with bulk pricing negotiated) C) Manual outreach — building niche lists through scrapebox, paying a Virtual Assistant (VA) to qualify prospects and collect emails through hunter.io, then automate pitches and follow ups with pitchbox (Virtual Assistant (VA) only deals with responses) D) In some cases, paying an external vendor to build links (been hit and miss)
scubyduby ✍️ How effective is manual outreach? Which strategy brings the highest Return of Investment (RoI)?
Phantai Manual outreach is a grind. It's not super effective, but if you have a good machine running (I.e. you always have new lists ready to go, always have emails going out, never let a reply sit in the inbox for more than 12 hours, etc.) then it can at the very least be predictable and consistent. It's technically scalable (hire and train more Virtual Assistants (VA)s, write more email templates for new niches, etc) — but it only scales linearly (that is, with the resources you put in). Return of Investment (RoI) can really depend on the niche. For example, there a lot of decent tech websites that are open to guest posts or link edits for as little as 50 USD. scubyduby ✍️ Ah well. I guess that's why a lot of SEO users have teams. They do it for years, then use their relationships for other clients and continue doing it with their trained team of writers or outreach staff.
