Staying Motivated With Your Link Building Campaign

If you’ve been spending a lot of time in the link building trenches, you’ll know that it can feel a lot like hard work – a bit too much, sometimes. You send all these emails, you go through thousands of sites looking for broken links and/ or contact details and you just feel like it’s never going to end. I’ve been there; if I’m honest, I regularly get flashes where I think “stuff this, where’s the credit card?”, but I’ve found a few ways that help me stick with it. Today, I’m sharing a couple of quick tips to help you stay motivated with your link building campaign.

Get Organised

This sounds obvious, but a lot of people just don’t do this. Their link building campaigns are organised with a couple of haphazardly-constructed spreadsheets, a dozen Notepad files or, worst of all, a ton of post-it notes. As much as I love chaos, it seems to be the enemy of motivation when it comes to linking.

I’ve been using spreadsheets and databases for a while to track my link building campaigns, but my latest toy is Buzzstream (aff) – a CRM designed specifically for linking. It’s awesome; it’s a backlink analyser, contact manager, link prospector and task list all in one. Buzzstream can do so much that I don’t think I’ve quite scratched the surface, but knowing that everything’s all in one place, how easily I can use it to find contact details (it finds email addresses, phone numbers and Twitter accounts if they’re available) and the fact that it integrates very well with other tools is a real weight off my mind.

Change Your Outreach Emails

Most of the time, outreach emails are very dull, standard “Hi, really like your site, did you know this link is broken, maybe you’d like to link here instead” kind of fare, and there’s no denying that if you write them properly, they work. Sometimes, however, you can have a bit of fun with them.

I tend to use different characters with mine. I put myself into the shoes of someone that would actually look at these sites and tailor my communication around them. And sometimes, I throw it all out there and tell them that I’m one of those evil SEO types that their mummy warned them about and I would very much like it if they’d link to my clients’ site. You know what? This actually seems to work – you just need to write it in a way that makes them laugh. Get a laugh, you’re well on the way to getting a link and you’ve had a fun chat along the way. This won’t work every time, of course, but I find that throwing a bit of creativity into my outreach keeps me motivated and also tends to get results.

Track Your Results

Seeing that your work is paying dividends is probably the best way to stay motivated with a link building campaign and just about any other kind of work. Of course, rankings take time to be affected and things like Open Site Explorer and Majestic can take a while to pick up your shiny new links, but there are other ways to see the results.

I’ve been using Linkstant for a while and I really like it. Just sign up, add a couple of lines of Javascript to your site and you can get email or even SMS alerts when you score a new link. This is a serious win for motivation – having your email flooded with notifications about new links is one of the biggest boosts I’ve ever experienced when link building and I’d recommend it to anyone.

There are other tools out there that do a similar thing – I’ve just signed up to Monitor Backlinks to trial on this site – but if you can use something like this, I cannot recommend this highly enough.

I hope today’s post has helped. As always, any suggestions are welcome and shares are always appreciated – a link never goes amiss either.