# Module 5.2: How to Create a Link Building System

Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the second lesson
in the team building, systems and workflows module.
In this lesson, we're going to go over
how&nbsp;to create a link building system
to maximize your team's
effectiveness and efficiency.
Now, systems are key to scaling.
They help your team stay organized
and smoothen&nbsp;out processes.
But many people think that a system is
just a list of steps where you hire people
to fill those roles.
For example, an assembly line
might&nbsp;have spots for 3 people.
A packer, an inspector, and a sealer.
The first person is responsible
for packing the box.
Then it moves down the conveyor&nbsp;belt to
the second person, who's responsible for
inspecting the contents.
Then it moves down again&nbsp;to
the final person who seals the box.
Everything runs like a well-oiled machine
and each person is doing their part.
Now, while this all seems well and good, complex
systems will almost never work this smoothly.
And there are two reasons for that.
#1. Systems need to be customized for
the organization and the people in it.
For example,&nbsp;an organization may choose
only to contact&nbsp;editors with bespoke emails
to protect potential&nbsp;damage done to
their brand via. templated emails.
Or a company that outsources link building,
may&nbsp;not want to give you an @ domain email,
which can potentially change
the angle you go in with.
And #2. The efficiency of a system is fragile.
For example, if the first person in our assembly
line were to quit, then the other two people have
nothing to do.
But that's an easy fix.
Just hire and train someone else.
The real fragility in a system that's
built for&nbsp;scale is alignment.
For example, let's say the first person packs
the box and then the package moves down
to the second person.
They check the contents and they're like...
"Hey, you can't just&nbsp;throw the item
in the box like this.
You need to place the item so it's facing this way."
And then the first person might
be like... "who cares?"&nbsp;
They might continue to argue
with&nbsp;no real conclusion.
All the while, the third person is just
waiting to seal the box and the queue
of items are just building up.
In other words, while the system is
designed to move in the same direction,
the people aren't aligned, which
makes their impact null.
Now, because of these reasons, I'm going
to share the 5 key components to create
a link building system that will
be&nbsp;right for your organization.
Alright, so the first component
is the structure of the team.
Ideally, you want to have different&nbsp;team
members handle different parts of the link
building process.
This helps to create your assembly line
from a structural standpoint and it also
helps&nbsp;individuals to develop
mastery in their role.
And as people get better at their jobs,
things move faster and more effectively.
The second is alignment
in&nbsp;your company's goals.
It might sound cheesy to some, but I think
it's important to set specific goals for your
link building team.
For example, you may have a&nbsp;goal to get
50 new referring domains each month
to revenue-generating pages.
And the purpose&nbsp;of these links is
to rank higher in Google and get
more traffic as a result.
Now, when each member knows and
understands this goal, it makes their
work more meaningful because they know
what they're working towards and what it'll
take to get there.
A common incentive I've seen companies
do is to give their link building team monthly,
quarterly, or annual performance bonuses.
This can help to further incentivize the team
as&nbsp;a unit because each person depends on
the other to reach the company's goals.
The third component is to create
standard operating procedures or SOPs.
These are detailed documents and
videos that explain how to carry out
a task from start to finish.
They help to ensure that each person&nbsp;is
moving in the same direction&nbsp;towards
the same goal.
And they're also great&nbsp;resources to
have when onboarding new hires.
Now, the best way to create SOPs is to
actually go through the process yourself,
or have a team lead do it.
And while you're&nbsp;doing the prospecting,
vetting, and outreach, you should document
the process as if you're&nbsp;teaching
someone who's never done it before.
And when you hand these off to new employees,&nbsp;
it should ease quite a bit of the hand holding&nbsp;&nbsp;
that you'd have to do otherwise.
At Ahrefs, we create SOPs for pretty
much every marketing channel.
We have them&nbsp;for our blog, for our
YouTube channel, and of course,
for link building.
Alright, the fourth component is
to use a project management tool.
Project management tools like Trello,
Notion, Airtable, and Asana are a great
way&nbsp;to organize all your
campaigns in one spot.
And they're particularly useful if you have
multiple campaigns running simultaneously.
Let's look at an example using
Kanban boards in Notion.
As you can see, I've created 5 columns and
named them Brainstorming, Prospecting,
Vetting, Outreach, and Completed.
These represent the various stages
that&nbsp;a campaign may go through.
I've also created&nbsp;some cards,
which represent campaigns.
Now, within each of these cards, you can
assign&nbsp;it to a team member, change statuses,
add custom fields and files, leave comments
and tag other&nbsp;members in your organization,
and add whatever you'd like
in the description area.
This will help you stay organized by keeping
your assets in one place and also all relevant
communications should take place there too.
Now, to show you how this works, let's say
that the&nbsp;brainstorming stage went well and
it was time for prospecting.
The person in charge of this step&nbsp;would
then choose "prospecting" as the status,
assign it to the prospector, and then
leave a comment to let them know.
Now, if we go back to the kanban board,
you'll&nbsp;see that it's moved down the pipeline.
And as you continue to progress through
your campaign,&nbsp;it'll continue to move down
the assembly line.
Now, imagine you had 10 different&nbsp;campaigns
running at once with a team of 5.
At any given point, everyone&nbsp;on your
team will be able to get a high level
view of where each link building campaign
is and what they're responsible for.
Alright the fifth component of a link
building&nbsp;system is to use a campaign
management tool that supports
simultaneous collaboration.
Now, when I say campaign management,
I'm referring to the actual campaign data
you'll be working with.
And the best tool for this is Google Sheets.
You can customize your sheet however you'd
like and multiple team members can work
together simultaneously so no time is wasted.
For example, if you had two vetters working
on a campaign, one can start from the top
of the list and another from the bottom
to double the speed of vetting.
You can also write your own functions
in App Scripts, allowing you to connect
to third party APIs.
And this is how you'd&nbsp;run a blitz
list right inside Sheets.
On top of that, Google Sheets has a ton of built
in functions like QUERY, FILTER, and VLOOKUP
to name a few.
These will help filter large&nbsp;datasets
and match data from other sources.
Now, no system is perfect and it's
going to require some tweaking.
So as you go through the process, be
conscious of inefficiencies and blockers
and find ways to eliminate them with the
people&nbsp;who are involved in these processes.
And I can't stress how important it is
to&nbsp;solve these quickly because a lot of
time can be wasted by just dealing with
inconveniences&nbsp;that can potentially be
solved easily.
Now, the system is just the structure of
your everyday link building operations.
Workflows on the other hand
are what fuel&nbsp;the system.
And that's what your team will be using
day in and day out to execute&nbsp;these link
building campaigns.
So in the next lesson, I'll show you what a
hypothetical link building team's workflows
might look like in action.
I'll see you there.