How to launch a linkbuilding campaign quickly

Familiar with the basics of linkbuilding but having trouble launching a campaign?

A linkbuilding campaign can be broken down into three tasks:

Finding potential link donors.

Finding contact information.

Sending out emails.

Most of the instructions on the Internet focus on the last part - sending out emails. But if you have ever been involved in link building with bloggers before, you know that the main difficulty arises at the stage of finding donors and finding their contact information.

If you can manage that, then sending out emails is no longer a hassle.

So in our tutorial, we will focus on how you can make the first two stages of the process more efficient. We'll also cover how to systematise, automate and scale your campaign.

Process

Before we get started, we need to choose our campaign type.

To keep it simple, let's focus on the guest posting campaign option.

Don't rush to close this article - we know that guest posting is hard to call engaging. It's tedious, and that's been known for a long time. We're only using it here because it's the easiest example to demonstrate the process.

Finding potential link donors

The first part of the solution is to forgo the usual approach and not search for link donors through Google.

Don't get me wrong, Google is great for finding donors for any type of campaign, but when speed is important, it only becomes an obstacle. You need to extract results, massively check SEO metrics with third-party tools and so on - all in all, it takes too much time.

That's why we use Ahrefs' Content Explorer instead.

Content Explorer is a searchable and filterable database with information on about a billion web pages.

We're not going to use search operators here to find pages with guest posting offers - although Content Explorer allows us to do that.

Instead, we're going to use it to find sites about related topics.

There are three reasons for this:

Most people are open to guest posting - even if they don't have a collaborative page.

If a site has already published content on topics related to yours, then we can be confident that this site is a suitable donor.

This gives us two important leads (the URL of the article and its author) that will help us find the contact information we need.

Finding contact information

Before we can reach out to representatives of these sites, we need to find their contact information - specifically, the first name, last name, and email address of the right person.

This usually becomes a major hurdle for two reasons:

You have to do it manually. You need to visit the sites, find the contact person's name and look for their email address.

Some sites are easier to find contact information than others. At times, it can easily take more than 15 minutes to find just one address.

There's a better solution:

Instead of searching for addresses manually, we're going to outsource all the "black" work to Hunter. All you have to do is provide it with your first name, last name, and website address.

Don't expect to find every address. The person must be directly linked to the site (that is, he must have his own mailbox on the domain of the site); in addition, he must be in the Hunter database.

Finally, you need to check the addresses found by Hunter using Neverbounce or another similar service.

Sending emails

The good news is that the hard part is over. All that's left is to upload our potential donor lists to Mailshake, Buzzstream, Pitchbox or another similar mailing tool.

And, of course, write an email template using the value substitution fields.

At this stage, you can start sending out the resulting non-personalised emails left and right - but this is highly discouraged. Personalising emails is the only thing that separates a good campaign from spamming. Just because we've automated most of the work doesn't mean that the rules of good outreach no longer apply.

We automate routine activities so we can spend more time on the really important things, like personalising emails and taking care not to scare off potential donors.

Would you say it takes too long to personalise emails? Yes, of course, but even if you spend five minutes per email, you'll have 12 emails per hour.

Even assuming a low campaign performance of 8%, we still get one link per hour of work.

But if you still think that's too much work for one link, then the next section might interest you.

How to systematise, automate and scale this process

Finding someone to send out emails for you is easy enough: just place an advert on a freelance site like Upwork.
But why stop there? You can:

Systematise and delegate almost any part of the process.

Automate actions to reduce the amount of manual work.

Scale up and send out emails to more potential donors.

Here's what you need to do to do it:

Systematise

What was described above is the linkbuilding process. But after all, a process is not the same as a system. A process is a series of actions to achieve an end goal, while a system connects those actions into a cohesive sequence.

Simply put, once you have a system in place, all you have to do is run it and it will do the rest.

Here's a simple way to turn the process described above into a system:

First, create a Trello board with lists for each stage of the process.

Second, create documentation for each stage.

Google Docs are best for this, as they make it easy to share documents with other members of your team. For the process described above, you'll need to create three documents: one for finding donors, one for finding contact information, and one for sending out emails.

Third, create a new list on your Trello board and add links to the documentation.

Now, to launch a campaign, all you need to do is create a new card, tag the person responsible for completing the first task, and point them to the documentation.

But what happens next when the person completes that task? Do you have to keep track of everything and assign another person each time to implement the next step?

No. Just make the transition to the next step part of your documentation.

A system where all the gears are turning perfectly is great, but wouldn't it be better to reduce the number of gears that need to turn?

And that's where automation comes in.

Scaling

As you've read through this guide, you've probably noticed that while this process is fast, systematisable and even partially automated, it screens out a lot of potential donors.

Indeed, Content Explorer finds names for only a fraction of pages, Hunter finds email addresses for only a fraction of potential donors, and Neverbounce only confirms a fraction of email addresses.

If you start with a list of 1,000 potential donors, you may only have 100 by the end of the process.

Since the number of donors for any campaign is limited, it's irrational to discard 90% of them.

But the bottom line is this: you don't need to discard them.

The goal of this process is to get your linkbuilding campaign up and running as quickly as possible, not to run it perfectly.

Following the above instructions will help you quickly see if your campaign has prospects.

If there are no prospects, fold it.

If there are prospects, it's time to scale up.

Once you have a system in place, scaling up is easy: just create an additional piece of documentation to look up names and email addresses manually.

But that's not the only scaling option. You can also:

Run multiple campaigns.

Apply these principles to other linkbuilding tactics.

Launching a linkbuilding campaign doesn't have to take days - or even hours.