I’m going to show you how I outsource my link building. Yes, I said outsource, but it’s probably not the type of scary outsourcing that most of you are thinking of right now. This has nothing to do with directory submissions, social bookmarks, blog comments, forums profiles, or any crap like that.
I’m running a small SEO Company in Australia, and until I can afford to move into a fancy office like SEOmoz and hire full-time employees, I will have to make use of the opportunities the Internet offers, in this case outsourcers.
The ingredients that work for me:
- An affordable person who is Internet savvy, knows how to use Google search operators, and knows how to send template emails.
- Several quality link resource websites, which are interesting enough as a link exchange offer for the website owners we approach.
- A free Google Apps account so we can use Gmail to send emails from one of our link resources domains. Allows people to log in from anywhere.
- Raventools Link Manager
I’m going to show you examples and screenshots of the entire process. From the initial search query, to the end-results (links galore!)
Step one, help them find the sites you want links from.
This is a quote straight from the basecamp project which I have created for my link builders.
Here are a few things we need to keep in mind if we are searching for websites to request links from. I will add new observations to this list as we go. If you have any questions, just reply to this message down below.
Always use Google.com or the Google site for the country we are looking to get links from. For example, if we want Australian sites, please use Google.com.au – This is because the results will be different from Google.com.ph When we want links from only Australian sites, use the Google search operator like this: inurl:.links.html keyword site:.com.au
Link pages on sites are usually called link,links,resources,partners,useful links, etc. To find these use the Google search operator: inurl:.links.html keyword Besides .html, other popular extensions are: htm, xhtml, php, asp, aspx
It is a basic understanding and reference point for the link builders. If they have any questions, they add comments to the basecamp thread, and I will answer them, so they can always go back in and find out how I want them to find potential link partners.
Depending on the project we are working on, I usually just compile a list of 800 keywords from the Google Adwords tool. I trim it down to around 50 keywords, which I want them to use when searching for link pages. This can keep them busy for weeks, because I let them go through the first few hundred SERPs of every query they make.
Some tools to speed things up for them are the Multi-Link Firefox add-on, which automatically opens every result link in a new tab, and the Raven toolbar, which will allow them to add link requests to the campaign with a single click. It will also tell them if a site was contacted before, and if we already have a link there or not.
Step two, make the initial communication with the link prospect easy
In order for us to maintain a steady rate of link requests per day, a lot of our emails are templates. Some of the variables in the templates need to be personalized for every link request, such as the page title, first name, their links page URL, our links page offer URL.
For example, in the email header, we like to use the websites title: “Regarding the Sydney Blue Widget site”. Or, we do A/B split testing, we use something like: “A suggestion for the sydneybluewidget.com.au site” – whatever makes it seem more personalized. The templates have markings on the variable places, where the linkbuilders need to change the details. This was done with Notepad++, but now we’re using a plugin we only recently discovered called “Canned Responses” for gmail. (found that little gem via the SEER Interactive blog a few weeks ago)
In this case, I’d offer them a link on one of our web properties that is relevant for a Sydney small business. We’ve got a lot of geographical and business niche topical pages on our exchange sites, and small business owners love getting links from these sites. Once they’re hooked on the idea of getting a link, we ask them to return the favor by linking from page XYX to our client for that project.
This is where the outsourced link building stops. They’ve found a prospect, they’ve emailed them an offer, they’ve added the request to the Raven link manager and set the system to check if the link goes live, and they’ve labeled the conversation as “follow up” or “in progress” in gmail. So when I log in, I can see exactly which emails need to be actioned.
Step three, the follow up
This is what the current inbox looks like. I’ve cleaned it up a little for client privacy reasons. 
It looks like it’s time for me to action some of these emails, because there’s a few people in there who are happy to give me the links I requested. As you can see there’s plenty of responses, and they keep coming in, which means I have to spend a few hours per day hustling over email to get the best possible links for my clients.
Final Thoughts – Is it worth it?
This method has worked quite well for me, and because for the link builders its more of a numbers game than anything else, I have had some exceptional links come from the way we do this. Not all links will be great links, but some that we get are exceptional.
Just last week I got a fantastic link on the homepage of a pagerank 6 .GOV site, with over 50K backlinks, and my link is the second link on the page, above the fold, followed, my keywords, and it is the only outbound link on a highly relevant site. All because of a quick email template. The link builders take an average of 3 minutes per email request, so that’s ~20 per hour / ~160 per day / ~800 per week / ~3200 per month. With a response rate of ~5%, we’re placing about 160 links per month per link builder.
They get paid $2 per hour, which is actually higher than the average wage in the Philippines, so they’re quite happy with it. I think it’s definitely worth it. Obviously the follow up is your job, and you have to convince the website owners to get that link up, but isn’t that the fun part of link building?
