How to build your link building team in the Philippines
Part of every SEO strategy right after doing the on-site optimization is to do a lot of off-site optimization or link building. Where every agency or SEO have different ways of doing it.
One of the most common strategies seen today is guest blogging or article submission to website owners primarily to build relationships and send great articles to publish and gain popularity at the same time links.
However not all link building or outreach strategies can be done by a single person or SEO or SEO agencies specially when they are handling a lot of projects.
That is where your outsourced staff of link builders or link building team in the Philippines comes in handy.
So how to build your link building team in the Philippines?
First contact an agency who is already doing it, most likely an agency based in the Philippines who already have strong connections with the western culture and a large pool of English speaking talents.
Analyze your requirements:
What are you looking for a partner site? This may be a set of metrics, ranging from page rank, domain authority, relevancy, indexed pages, domain age, and many other factors that SEOs take into consideration.
How many links and how many clients are you building links for?
At times you may already have a clear view of how many people you may need for your projects, sometimes what I do is help clients in finding the right talents and translate those into your project requirements.
Some of the things you may be looking for a specialized link builder or outreach specialist:
Internet savvy individuals, someone who is already familiar with the internet, has social media profiles, at least read several other websites aside from sulit.com.ph or ayosdito.ph some of the most popular websites here in the Philippines. =.>
Someone who knows how to write a news headline, Why?, because part of the outreach is to provide webmasters a reason to open your email, and part of that process is providing a headline that has the highest probability of being opened by webmasters and publishers.
Someone who has a website or a blog for some obvious reasons, that the business revolves around websites and webmasters and you got a plus here, that this person already know how to write articles.
Someone who has a sales experience, because the idea of email outreach to place your articles on other people’s website, and email outreach is basically like sales. A link builder will try and convince a publisher what are the selling points of his article, what makes it unique and interesting, what value a webmaster will get from publishing his article. So go get sales people.
Someone who has great comprehension and problem solving skills, simply because part of the outreach is understanding and researching what webmasters need, what type of articles fits the audience of the site, what type of articles will gain more readers for the website.
Now that you have determined what type of people you need on your team probably with additional requirements like experience and education.
Time and availability to work with the team:
Part of executing the outsourced staff well is being able to work with at the same time you are working on your projects.
Filipino outsource is known to adjust their time of working based on the time that their clients are working, for example if you a client from London or UK the ideal time to work for you is 9am to 5pm so your Filipino counterpart should be working 3pm to 12pm Philippines time. Same goes for other parts of the world like for US clients where Filipinos are usually working on night shifts and AUS clients whose working time is just one hour earlier than normal working hours for Filipinos.
Finally when you are building a team
Same goes for all hiring process, find people who are really interested in the industry, people who want to be known publishers themselves. People who believe what you believe makes everyone’s job easier.
Case study: Link building in the Gambling Industry
What we did:
1. Build a total of @#$ new pages with links from quality websites.
2. CONTACT
- – We reach out to webmasters by personalized approach (no templates)
- – We don’t mention the client and partner details. We only mention the client details when the site is approved and we know the webmaster is 100% interested.
3. All websites are assessed making sure that we are only partnering with legitimate ones and not made for link building purposes.
The following are some of the parameters that all of our crew take into consideration when they evaluate a site that is good for linking:
- – Minimum Pr 2 home page
– 10-20 linking root domains
– 50-75 indexed pages
– Minimum 20 Domain Authority
– More than 1 year Domain Age
– No obvious Paid Links on Home page
– Good quality site content/ articles, more or less no duplicate content
– Relevant to client’s site we will be targeting sports related websites.
– No Hidden text/link
– No Keyword stuffing
– Not a Dropped Domain
– Not a directory
– For Blog sites, latest articles posted should not be older than 1 month
– For Content site, content should be well written and should more or less have unique content
4. Even if these parameters were set we were able to deliver sites that are of high standards with overall average SEO scores of:
- Average PR 3.5
- Average Domain Authority of 40.3
- Average Linking root Domains 295
- Average Age of Site: 4.48 years
5. Topic suggestions for article creation
- When the webmaster replies, the Outreach specialist suggests topics and asks the webmaster what they want in return.
- Topic suggestions on the initial reply gain a more positive feedback from webmasters because this gives an impression that the Outreach specialist has indeed read the site. (Which in fact they do)
- CONFLICT: Our suggested topic is different from the webmaster’s (and the client’s) topic in mind
- COMPROMISE: The link Outreach specialist’s suggested topic is always relevant to the site and keywords for the client. We want the link to look natural on the site. However, the topic is still subject for the webmaster’s and the client’s approval.
- When we send articles to webmasters we make sure the articles are well researched and fit the site’s content.
6. No mention of fee or money involved
- – we don’t want to be branded as link buying (unless the webmasters asks for a fee)
- – when a webmaster asks for payment, we make sure we negotiate for the lowest price possible that will naturally depend on the site’s strength.
7. APPROVAL
– We only send sites for approval and put on a Google Doc where everyone can see it:
- when we are 100% sure that the webmaster agrees for the placement.
- if the webmaster asked for the anchor text and landing page.
8. We make sure that whenever an article goes live, we make it a point to ask webmasters to share it to their Social Media.
And here are the people who made this possible well including me (I’m the one who took the picture)
big credits to:
Sarah Bonto, Mikez Ancheta and Vincent Munsod who are the link builders and operations who did this project.
Managing a Start up Link Building Company
Since working with 3 different SEO/Link Building agencies, most of the time I am more involved in suggesting in ways to do better link building outreach. On the first month here on our new office I was able to increase link production and reduce cost compared to their previous providers. Most of the time before I suggest anything I test it out first and present data that are doable and actionable. In effect we were able to land more work slowly scale our operation considering we are only on the 4th month of our operation.
During our first month of operation, I instructed everyone (11 link developers) to not use templates anymore and send more personal emails. This resulted in less outreach sent but increased the reply rate significantly. The outreach guys were also able to build more significant relationships from webmasters and reach more legit sites not for link building purposes. Management were hesitant about the idea because it will reduce the emails sent but the converted deals was much more significant and clients were happy with the links that we acquired.
One client asked me that he would only need links from sites under 100k Alexa rank and would need contact information and traffic data from all of that. What I did was download the top 1m of alexa rank, put 100k sites on buzzstream, after a day I came back to the client and told him I was able to gather all the data on contact information and related sites. The client was actually surprised how fast I worked and we landed the gig.
Managing a start-up with limited capital, we had to start our operations at home, I know I had to boost productivity the soonest so we can go to a profitable status. I know that if we only look quality sites it would be easier for our clients to approve the sites for the links. So instead of working more started working smarter and greatly increasing the quality first. This reduced the back and forth from clients rejecting our sites and it was a steady pace and we are not wasting valuable time by contacting low quality sites.
What was eye opening about all of this was, at first we thought it will be hard, it will be different, but even with all the hard work it was also exciting and fulfilling knowing that you have built something and at the same time you were able to inspire people and improve what they are doing, that,that really hits the heart.
Why do you need online presence?
It’s Not Where You Are; It’s Where Your Clients Are
I remember talking with a guy who operates a travel agency. He said that being ranked at the top of Google was not important because “when I want to know something, I use the Yellow Pages.” That might be true, but who cares where you look? What’s important is where your clients look.
Do some market research to see if individuals are using Search engines to discover you. Ask your clients how they found you. Ask other entrepreneurs in the same industry how they get business (and share how you get business, too). The more you learn about your clients, the more effective you are going to be.
Times have changed (And They change Fast)
Many businesses were extremely effective before the Internet. They think, “if it’s not damaged, why fix it?” Well, maybe it is damaged. There are two psychological barriers human minds usually fall into:
We usually think that if doing A, B and C proved helpful for us in the past, they are going to work for us now. But times have changed: the way people look for services is not the same now as it was 10 years ago, and the Internet modified the way individuals shop. You either adjust or gradually die.
We usually do an awful job understanding connection and causality. It’s very common to discover individuals who claim they are effective because of something they did, when the reality is that they are effective despite something they did. So if your company has been effective without a powerful online presence, it does not mean that not having an online presence is the reason of your success; it indicates that you have been effective despite not having an online presence, and you can be a lot more effective growing your business online.
Timing Is Key
I remember when I started running my first link development campaign back in 2010 : I could get one way links for 10usd or even free. It was awesome! I also keep in mind how easy it was to position a website naturally at the top of Search engines back then. As more smart promoters and cool companies get into the industry, it becomes more and more aggressive. This implies that timing is key; the earlier you start developing a powerful online presence, the easier (and more affordable) it will be.
Personal blog of Emmanuelle Vivas
Thank you for visiting my site! Here you can find different entries about my life. I have a keen interest in online marketing and if you want to get a few ideas here please read on. . .
Enjoy!
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