As most of you probably know, link building is a time consuming activity and manually requesting links can be the most boring SEO activity. Although this requesting needs to be done to get a good link basis, most of the time it is just too expensive to do it yourself. So when do you hire someone and who do you hire for which job? In this article I will give my opinion and hopefully you will all comment to give me your thoughts.
Link acquisition methods
In linkbuilding we distinguish between three basic ways how new links are acquired.
- Script driven links
These links are generated by scripts. Sites like Google scour the web and generate links. But also RSS feeds that are syndicated and other scripts generate links. - Requested links
These links are requested or submitted by the website owner or someone directly associated to him. It requires a manual or automated action to get the links. - Human driven links
These links are placed by people without the request of the webmaster. Just because they like the site or because it is very relevant for the content on their website.
Manually requested links
There are many link opportunities that require some kind of action on your part to get the link. For instance to get listed in directories, you can make use of automated directory submission services, but quality directories are still human edited. Your success rates will dramatically drop when you request all links with the same message.
A link request should be a personal message to the human editor and that is hard to automate. Not only directory submissions, but every link that requires a request needs to be as personal as possible. Even paid links need to be requested and a personal bond can make it cheaper.
Request administration
First create a list of every place where you would like to get a link. Once a list of possible link partners has been made, check which links are requestable. Human driven links can be gotten with just marketing and promotion, but once you have relevant content, you can also request the link. Script driven links are maintained automatically, but sometimes submitting for instance your RSS feed is required to get listed. It can at least speed up the process. You can use link administration software to help you categorize the links.
When do you automate, outsource or do your own link requests?
For every requestable link, find out what content is the most suitable for that site. Plan the creation of new content/linkbait for some of those links. See if that linkable content can be created through automation, requires normal written text or requires your expertise.
Then categorize the request process itself between automated, manual outsource and manual do-it-yourself. Don’t look just at the technical possibilities, but also look at the value of that link for your ranking, should it be placed. Use the RAT checklist to help determine its value. Also look at the quality of outsourced link builders. I use both cheap labour for easy links, experts for more difficult links and myself for the hardest links.
Making it easy for cheap labour
Marketing expertise is a trade you won’t find in cheap labour and a link request consists mainly of marketing. You have to model the link request process so that the email contact is just a tiny part of it all and the email contact can be outsourced to cheap labour. This can be done by:
- creating specific linkable content for every group of linkers,
- creating exchange methods (return links, promotion, money, etc.) as reward when your content isn’t enough,
- creating a couple of standard first messages that can be easily personalized to become unique,
- instructing ways to research the linker and his interests and standard ways to personalize the request message to that linker,
- instructing how to combine the right content for the right linker with the right anchor text and description and still making it unique,
- instructing link worth and when to use exchange methods and
- instructing how to react to certain replies.
As you can see you still have to do quite some work, but your effort doesn’t need to grow with an increasing amount of requests. If the request process involves thousands of personalized emails, you can better use cheap labour than doing it yourself. And you can always outsource this link building supervision to an expert and let him prepare everything for the cheap labour.
Hiring cheap labour
Sending emails and following your instructions requires: language skills, internet access and supervision. The language skills required determine how cheap the work can be.
People from India can be used for English. They’re relatively cheap, have internet access and also have highly educated people available to do the toughest work and give local supervision. For Dutch you can use people from Surinam; The French have northern Africa; For Spanish you can use South America; And the Chinese have their own cheap labour.
But most of the time I need quality work and I use local people. Local people can connect better to the linker and success rates are much higher. I hire students and housewives because the work can be done from home and whenever they want. When you pay them for every successfull request, they’ll be extra motivated. The Dutch language skills are better than people from Surinam and they are more creative in persuading the linker. Most of the time they also have more feeling with the product or service they are link building for.
Conclusion
- Hire linkbuilders as cheap as possible, but differentiate by skills required for a certain success rate.
- Hire separately for link bait creation and link acquisition.
- Hire locally for harder links and find people that could understand the field they are linkbuilding for.
- Hire experts to prepare, instruct and supervise the whole project. This is a real sub-expertise of search engine marketing and most SEO’s should stick with code and content. I do most of it myself, but that is because I’m a real cheapskate
