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Byline 600

hi everyone my name is kevin rowe and i'm going to be talking about how i built 600 links in a single month now i did this with a small team um so i don't want to make it sound like i did this myself it was definitely not something you can do individually but i'm going to give you really a playbook of how i went about building out the resources um uh and the processes in order to do this so a little bit about me i'm founder and ceo of purelink i have now founded uh seven uh i've founded two seven figure seo companies five companies that have failed two that have been um somewhat successful and my passion right now is all about seo automation technology link building and the link quality raider guidelines you know quality of links right so that's a really big area of interest of mine i've worked on companies like hotels bulletproof coffee custom ink we do a lot of my companies do a lot of work with enterprise scale projects and now when i say i built a hundred links one month i'm talking about how we went from zero links to 600 links in 30 days one one really important part about about um uh you know building out the right length is having the right technology i want to tell you a story about uh my first huffy my first bike um coming you know when i was when i was in middle school or a little bit earlier um you know i remember i had a little crappy huffy um you know i'm sure many of you know what this is if you didn't have one uh when you were younger as well and it was a good tool for what i needed it for so this means i'd come i come home from school you know i'd go ride my bike to my friend i go down the i'd go to trails behind my house this was a good bike for that right so there's a hundred dollar bike um you know it probably weighed about 50 pounds the gears would the gears would break chain very likely fall off um you know it was a typical squeaky chain you heard coming down the street sometimes now fast forward to today one of my passions are triathlons so i have i've done half ironmans i've done a lot of sprints olympic distance triathlons over the last several years and this requires a different type of bike so now i have a truck i have a truck a triathlon bike it does cost more but it's a unique technology right it's different it fits the situation that i have today and then on top of that i need to i needed to understand the tactics the approaches the process of training the process of getting ready for the events the process of even the process of riding the bike you'd be surprised how much you have to learn and know just to really be efficient on a any sort of road bike so that's what it comes down to but but what cup you know the technology is a big part of it the resource is a big part of it but now what types of links are you going to be are you do you really need to get in order to get 600 right so what types of links are you going to be able to get to 600 for and these are this this is an example so these two sites are two different bloggers websites so i'm talking about getting blogs um getting links inside of blogs or blogs on uh mommy bloggers niche relevant websites sometimes consultant websites you know these small blogs these micro influencers that um where their sites can when they're in editorial article excuse me in article editorial based links so i'm going to explain how i've gone about building process of getting these types of links and scaling it up to you know at one point i think 600 is an extremely aggressive number i'll show you the math to get there so according to a um you know a benchmark report from mailchimp from mailchimp they suggest that your typical open rates on email runs between 15 to 29 and that means you're and then on top of that your click-through rates are hitting 1.5 to 3.5 percent to give you an idea the table on the right-hand side breaks down how many emails prospects you're going to have to identify and how many emails you're going to have to submit in order to get that 600 list so for example you're not going to you're not out of the prospect list you build you will never find 100 of the emails it just it it's just no it's very difficult to do and extremely time consuming but you can get to you can get to 30 000 emails right so you can find thirty thousand emails at a forty thousand if you're doing a really great job of building a list it's it's time consuming um to build this proper list but if you do you can definitely find a huge percentage of those emails now with with the numbers i propose here you know eleven percent open rate three percent response rate and you know placement rate of roughly two percent sometimes we see on a cold email campaign again that's when you're going to be able to get to about 600 links with those metrics so so forty thousand prospects thirty thousand emails open rate roughly eleven percent response rate hitting around three percent on a good day um and then placement rates of about two percent so with that i'm i'm going to map out exactly how how many resources you're going to need to do this in a standard cold email outreach campaign first i want to talk about the elements of this what are the most time consuming things and the items in red the lists in red are the most time consuming aspects of a link building program so this is the general steps in the type of link building program they're very similar to what what i've built here um but the the ones that are going to take up the most time building a list identifying the sites vetting for quality finding the contacts is relatively easy now you can use if you're old school mechanical turk or there's other tools out there that'll help you find the contacts i'm not going to talk about that too deeply right now because i think that's something that has been well researched there's not really too much to talk about that process uh custom emails building custom emails extremely time intensive building the content that is actually one of the more time intensive aspects of any sort of content marketing or link building campaign building infographics studies uh long form articles that that that our people are more likely to link built to uh and then the outreach the outreach although many people do do uh bulk email outreach um uh you know i'll give you a re i'll explain to you why you don't want to do that but the outreach part can be extremely time consuming so the reason why you you want to customize your your emails right you want to customize each one to the the the publisher and their audience and you you really got to make sure that you're you're you're pitching them based on what's going to be interesting to your audience why a survey of over 300 bloggers about why they don't reply to emails from search engine journal suggested they don't reply because the content in the pitch was not a good fit for their audience what does this mean you need to segment your list and target your emails to very deeply and then sometimes you're actually going to follow the phone calls as well um but remember if you don't segment spend a lot of time um really refining your list and that does take a lot of time especially on thirty thousand to forty thousand prospects um that alone could take one person an entire month to do um if done with the high degree of detail so but remember the importance of this most of these publishers not replying because it's not targeted to them so all your outreach needs to be niche relevant now how many people do you need during a traditional cold emailed outreach approach to doing link building right so you you could probably you could probably do it with anywhere from 14 to 58 people if you want to build 600 links and 30 000 emails now here's how i came to that math first off if on the low end on on the low end of the the amount of time it takes to send an individual email you're probably looking at around five minutes per email that means you're researching the site their audience and writing the pitch and then getting that email out so that means that um emails per month per person you get around 2080 emails per month per person you're probably going to have about 160 hours per month on average per person that's if somebody's running really efficient really efficient um you know you're going to be able to get this number emails in 160 hour work month the estimated number of hours now under these numbers you're going to need 2 308 hours worth of work in a single month but you only have 106 hours per person so so being conservative you're going to need about 14 people to build 600 emails on the really high end if you're going to do one-to-one cold email outreach pitches these bloggers you may reach 20 minutes per per niche email if you do that you would need 58 people that means you're gonna get 520 emails out per person and now over 160 hour work month you're looking you're going to need 9231 hours man hours in order to get these emails out that's not a small effort it's the reality is for most companies that's not realistic and you're gonna need 58 people so how did how did we do it at purelink so first off we selected the right approach now what you have to do is you start shutting off a lot of the really time intensive bulk uh bulky type activities and tasks so there are two types of link building activities i like um there's two types of things i like doing two types of strategies i like to perform rather to reduce the amount of time it actually takes to do link building so one of those one of those is um one major one is thematic reclamation thematic reclamation is when you go out and you find a keyword inside of an article and then you ask them to insert a link inside that article it's a little bit more complicated than that there's more pitching that goes on you definitely want to you know broken broken link building is a form of this for sure the other one is unlinked brand mentions for example here bulletproof is a coffee brand or at least they have one product line that's a coffee so we're going to want to find people mentioning and talking about unlinked brand mentions for the word bulletproof but thematic on the other hand is people looking for coffee so the reason why we're selecting these approaches they don't require any new content um you don't have to guest post on their site if you do or if you do believe in guest posting or if you're a guest poster a lot of people now i know there are a portion of people that are against guest posting they think it doesn't work um but in this case you're not gonna have to do any guest posting um and and so that dramatically reduces time because when you're guest posting an article if you're even helping to get a link inside the article or in your byline um that that alone is you know it can usually be half a day right there just to write that one article so what are the key elements so now you know we're going to be only doing link inserts and thematic reclamation what are the key elements for this for this program first off technology right you need to have the right technology the right database the right way to access these sites or with the prospect correctly the processes and i cannot overemphasize enough how important the process processes are um so so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna explain to you how deeply i get into process throughout this presentation give you some examples i've done um but but you know you'll develop your own systems for sure and then lastly relationships i cannot even i cannot even say how important this was into developing out or over 600 links relationships mean a lot how much first off that gives us about they have given us a 90 percent response rate on our emails as opposed to you know um you know sometimes a three percent and you only need to really send out about 700 emails in a month as opposed to 30 000 um excuse me you need to uh um uh um you know uh so so even or even 40 000 or 50 000 whatever that might be um it dramatically reduces the number of sites because your your response rates are so much higher when these these publishers already know who you are so again in order to reach about 600 placements you're um around you know at the time we were hitting around we hit around 700 emails that open that response rate on those emails because of the pre-existing relationships we have meant a lot so how do you build these relationships uh some of the tools that you can use to do i'm not going to go too deep into reaching out i'll give you some some tips about how we did it and some of the hacks we did early on to um you know make sure they they or at least get a large percentage of these publishers replying to us but first off you can use certain tools like muckrack muckrack is not a link building tool it is a pr tool and what you're doing when you're building relationships is you're really performing online pr um there are other tools that allow you to track your relationships index them give them access you know provide a place where you can access them later on muckrack is good for pr but it's again it's not made for an seo it's made for public relations professional but you can build your list you can find really high-end authors influencers um contributors even to blogs to start to build your relationship with another tool that that you're going to be able to build or excuse me use is a pitch box i have used pitch box as a company as an individual for for several years until we built our own tool so pitchbox allows you to hold your own hold your own lists filter based on really important metrics now the big difference between the big difference between muckrack and something like pitch box is pitch box plus and domain authority trust flow citation flow count of links or the link profile of sorts um it also allows you to track your email outreach you can you can go in and filter through that list that you had you can also prospect entirely new lists right inside a pitch box so there are other tools out there pitch box you know is one of the the as far as price goes as a reputable company you know it isn't expensive it's one of the more expensive tools uh there's another one out there like ninja outreach or outreach ninja um i forget which order those words come in uh which also can do very similar things um you know as of right now i have no relationship with pitchbox but that's what we have used and we've found it to be extremely efficient especially a lot especially since it allows you to manage teams and oversee what the team is doing in the outreach great reporting system but how are you going to build those relationships what is the process of building and maintaining them um so you don't have to read all of this but i'll give you i'll give you an overview of um i'm going to give you a quick little overview of the building the list building process so first off you need to find and build your list of authors then after that you need to build a value proposition so a value proposition a value proposition is something that allows you to create a relationship and create value for them without expecting anything in return now one example that we did early on a value proposition was we used to crawl the websites of the publishers and we would we would provide them with a full list of all the broken links on the website remember a lot of these publishers they're not technical people they're not webmasters they're bloggers some of them you know the mommy bloggers they're great at content they're good and they're in the vertical and what they're passionate about doesn't necessarily mean they're great technical people so one of the as an seo and i think many of the people on this webinar um you know on this session are seos um little things you know provide a lot of value for your company like these free these simple audits you can do for simple technical audits that you can provide for free all of them are amazing opportunities to create value propositions keep in mind a value proposition many people ask me if it could be paid or if you should be paying for these types of things you can sponsor a website i don't see sponsoring a website and building a relationship while sponsoring a website because you're passionate about their content as something that violates um you know google link scheme guidelines in any way so after you're done with that you got to develop your pitch start the outreach and you know then you got to start the outreach and the pitch then you have to log them into your system and then after you're done with that you now have to um start that cycle all over again and now you're going to be doing that month after month after month this is really this this is not something that ends so in order for to give you an example of our list size we have right now about 50 000 independent sites authors influencers in our database you know so with that it's taken us a very long time to build that most of most of you will not need that size of a list you just won't it's it's too large for your effort if you're in house um you certainly you certainly will not need a list like that if you're an agency and you're selling a service um sure but just keep in mind it's taking us four years to actually build this list and vet properly and and things like that but if you want to get to say 100 200 300 that's something that's very attainable with a small team after that don't think you can't um don't think that you don't maintain that list okay that's extremely um um i'd say that's something that's most overlooked with people who are building relationships with publishers make sure they remember who you are right so you're going to be identifying um you're after you identify the values uh the the specific value then you're going to build reports or content then you're going to email that to them and then you want to do a social check-in potentially like messaging them on their social media or something like that or sharing their content sharing the content of a publisher is a great way to make sure they stay in contact with you excuse me now after that you have the store that says let's say you already have your list your you've you've you've you've prospected them using one of the previous tools um and now you need to place a store access and then email that list from some of the off the shelf technology buzzstream for example i think is actually a low-cost extremely extremely low-cost solution to storing that you can do something like google sheets if you have 100 a couple hundred um once you get into thousands google sheets have a tendency to you know not perform very well so you can use something like buzzstream which has great filtering capabilities it allows you to pull in metrics like d a um pa et cetera which is is whenever you're looking for one of these tools or you want to build your own tool make sure you can pull that in with an api um extremely time consuming to update those metrics every month on on every sites because they do change they do change on a month-to-month basis excuse me now now on top of this the pitch box will allow you to do that store it and then do um do outreach there as well and track it my the difference between buzz stream and pitch box buzzstream is something that um i i'd say the biggest difference is the cost um and actually the reporting capabilities are a little bit less robust than pitch box and buzzstream but because it's so cheap it makes it actually a very viable tool for for small businesses small teams or if you're just starting out you need a proof of concept buzzstream is a good starting place how you build your process is so important now i could not emphasize this enough um i think that's probably the 10th time i've said that i i got to emphasize everything in this in this presentation because it's extremely important process process process document it um so eos is an entrepreneur operating system as a model i've followed they have a book called traction and and eos is it's really about building a company the the process here is about building companies so this is the this this is the process they take the general layout of a process they take when they're when they're going about uh building their own internal and documenting their own process and that's a very important thing that you document that process especially if you're going to be building out teams around this so if you're internal or or or not if you're going to be building out a link building team having a branded process is really important this eos model is they have three steps first off you identify then you document then you package it properly that means you have it in a place where everybody knows where to access it and it's named appropriately for example our process is called the link mining process that's the process we use in order to mine through our database select the sites that are going to best fit our clients criteria and quality quality standards and that are going to pass the as a relative as a result of contextuality and the quality are going to pass the most value process mapping can get really granular or it can be very top level if you like to get really granular and process mapping like i do you can use a software called lucidcharts lucidcharts allow you to create these these process maps that have um have pre-built tools in it it works really well it has connectors uh you have the pre-built decision trees you can build as well so you can see for example here when we sign on and we start the distribution setup the first question is is it an existing client or not if the answer is no then we go review the client brief so if you've never been part of that project before you've got to review the brief um and then if you do know the client that's uh that's great then you can just skip that process and go into launching our tool uh and then move into checking the first tier of sites we have we have we have extremely robust processes for categorization tiers uh we have scoring systems a pure grade score that we created which which allows us to identify quality i like to actually map out when should you be selecting those type of sites what what is the process you know should you be looking at domain authority first and filtering by that to identify and limit down your sites or should be looking at um quality metrics or spam score or whatever it might be so i'm not going to go through all this it's not really important what our process is in this level of granularity but i will say you should consider building out your old process and getting down to this level of granularity with it i think that there's a really good case to be made for um there i think there's i think there's actually a very great case to be made for the need to map out even the decision making process and i know some people just some people really prefer to train and then give people the freedom to to go do their own mining or do their own link building although i have seen that work very successfully um i like to get very granular mapping on my process so that there is no mistakes made and it's very clear and then after you've gotten somebody up to speed maybe they can refine the process after that after they follow your process in detail your decision making in detail and then move on and allow them some of the flexibility to implement the program themselves now our top level process before you even get into the granular i'm going to show this is exactly how we go about doing it um so after you've built your database now you have that database and you need to go in and start to find links inside of it it's a very simple process after that and it's extremely efficient first off you need to identify the identify the criteria the metrics and the quality metrics and quality are two different things domain authority trust flow citation flow url rating domain rating spam score none of them actually represent quality um there's even a verve score out there for this uk based company that uh that in a recent survey in uk they found that this new verve score is becoming really important in identifying site quality or there's a lot of more people using it which is very interesting second you have to search your index so again you're going to have this index where you're going to need search that's what we call that's a large part of the mining process for us so you're going to filter and then manually review right so this is not something where you just upload the site the site is there and then you just move on and you never check it again before you go out every time you are you're going into your database to find a site you need to review it again uh because there are sites out there that will they'll be great at when you first start but something happens either they need a new revenue stream or whatnot but their quality of content starts tanking and then they start to sell you'll find they'll sell a lot of guest posts or something like that um it is really important that you manually review your sites um you know i'd say almost every time you're using them secondly now what you're going to want to do is go to ahrefs and search ahrefs for unlink brand mentions or thematic reclamation those those those keyword based uh i i think aehref's search feature uh is probably you know their their content explorer is probably one of the better tools on the market um for doing it you can go into google and do it and i'll show you an example of how i did that there but hrefs i prefer ahrefs then you're going to go develop your pitch prep right you're going to write a paragraph you need to when you're doing link inserts inside of existing articles a lot of times you're going to create a paragraph now that paragraph is going to be your pitch but a lot of what happens is you're going to get a link inside that paragraph and then when you pitch to the publishers a lot of the time what they'll do is they'll just copy and paste that paragraph if it makes sense of course i'll modify it but make that perfect for the article um and then after that you're going to start out reaching in buzzstream or you're going to do one-to-one one-to-one outreach through buzzstream or maybe your email marketing platform it can be google as well but i like to monitor open rates and things like that so if you're using gmail or or some other software try to identify a plug-in that will allow you to track open rates and make sure it's been delivered finally the last step is is really just to reconcile and make sure that that um they're still live after after you've done it every month so you can use scrape box or moz there's certain tools that you can use to to track what i like about scrape box it is an old school um tool but because it what it does is it you can upload a list and you can identify with scrapebox um is the link live inside the article is it no follower or or not new followed nobody do follows links anymore um or not too many people do is the page live was the page redirected there's a lot of things that that you'll want to know about your uh your link on an ongoing basis you need a tool to monitor it it is it is daunting to to monitor that by yourself um so part of this process again if if you don't have an ahrefs subscription asref is not cheap tool it just happens to be one of the better tools on the market you can go into google and use the site colon um you know site colon modifier to search certain you can actually search certain sites do a site individually like a site by site you can go in and search for like a term like this i happen to search for my name and then you can do a negative and then do a url to make sure that that url isn't linked to on the page as well a simpler process so i didn't exactly break down the intricacies of doing it inside of google they're called operators and and with the operators you're going to be able to you're going to be able to um you're going to be able to search through the sites in the title in the url and all those things it's extremely robust i don't have enough time to talk about here but using a tool like ahref it actually does a lot of that for you so as you can see here they actually have a function which says only show one page per domain which is great and then highlight unlinked domains some great features now next after that you've identified so here's a screenshot this is not our database this is just a it's a generic screenshot for a buzz stream you'll see that you'll be able to filter through by domain by metrics like domain authority or number of followers they have as well depending on the metrics you're going to be using to evaluate those one quick pro tip if you're going to if you're going to get serious about this you might want to think about building your own search engine so what i just showed you you're going to be doing that site by site by site so you're going to do one site search that site for your name look at all the different listings of for the brand term and then look at every listing for it sometimes there's hundreds thousands of pages so well we're doing it at such big scale right now that we actually had to build our own search engine um you can use something called sphinx if you're going to build it from the ground up then i mean this is something that you're going to go in and build a hosting you need to build a whole hosting server and everything like that in order to do it you can also use another software called elasticsearch which is a little bit easier to do sphynx based in python uh excuse me uh actually i want to i might have to correct myself on that one but i do think it is based in python is a is a tool that we've used we've used to build small search engines before everyone thank you very much uh you can contact me at underscore kevin rowe on twitter you can follow peer link at purelink or you can go to purelink.com and please download our latest ebook eat for link building that's purelink.com forward slash eat