# Module 5.3: A Link Building Team's Workflow in Action

﻿Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the third
lesson in the team building, systems and
workflows module.
And actually, it's the last lesson
in this link building course.
In this lesson, we're going to put
everything we've learned into action
and I'll show you what a link building campaign
might look like from a workflow standpoint.
So naturally, we'll revisit some concepts and
techniques that I taught in previous modules
and I'll also give you an over the shoulder
view of how the system works in reality.
Now, a lot of link building teams I've
seen&nbsp;typically work with a linear model.
The prospector does the prospecting,
then the vetter does the vetting, and
then the outreach manager sends
the&nbsp;emails once everything is ready.
Now, I've used this method for
many years&nbsp;and it does work.
But what I've found to work more efficiently
is a triangular model,&nbsp;especially when you're
using the techniques I've taught
throughout this course.
So here's&nbsp;what it looks like at a high level.
The prospector starts by looking for
prospects&nbsp;based on a linkable point.
They'll segment these prospects and pass
over their research to the outreach manager
who will begin drafting email
templates for each segment.
These are all things&nbsp;we've discussed
throughout the course.
The prospector will create a master
Google sheet and clean up the list,
then generate the blitz list and then they'll
pass over the campaign sheet to the vetter.
Now, the prospector is out of this
campaign so they'll actually pick
up another campaign to work on while
the&nbsp;rest of the team does their part.
Let's continue on with the vetter's role.
The vetter will review blitz list prospects in
batches starting with valid emails found
in the blitz list because&nbsp;it's the fastest
way to kick off a campaign and validate
whether your outreach angle will work.
Again, all of these concepts were
covered in previous lessons.
After they're done vetting this batch,
they'll&nbsp;contact the outreach manager
and they'll send off the first batch of emails.
Now, while the vetting and outreach
were happening, the prospector likely
finished their work on the second campaign.
They would have assigned more email templates
to the outreach manager and the vetter would
also start working on this campaign too.
And the cycle will continue where the prospector
picks up the next campaign or brainstorms more
opportunities and the system will continue
to operate like a well-oiled machine.
Now, by this point, none of these
campaigns have been completed.
They're all just&nbsp;being validated with blitz lists.
But once a campaign has been validated
from&nbsp;a blitz list, the vetter will start manually
reviewing the remainder of
the URLs in that&nbsp;campaign.
And each day before they log off, they'll ping
the outreach manager to let them know that
a batch of prospects are ready for them.
Now, if you're used to the linear model, then this
might have been slightly difficult to envision.
So let me give you an over the shoulder
view of what this looks like in action.
Alright, so let's assume that our link
building team consists of one prospector,
one vetter, and one outreach manager.
We'll call them Sam, George, and Josh.
Sam, the prospector starts off by having
a meeting&nbsp;with the content lead.
They come up with a few
different pages that need links.
One on content&nbsp;marketing stats, another
on blogging statistics,&nbsp;and one for their
link building post.
Now, in this meeting, they establish rough pitch
angles for each post and any assets that'll be
needed for the content to make the pitches work.
So a card is created for each campaign in
their project management tool, target URLs
are added, and some rough notes for general
guidance are added in the description.
Alright, so we're done brainstorming a small
batch of campaigns, so as the prospector,
I'll drag one of them into the prospecting stage
and start putting my research into a sheet.
Now, as you can see, the note that I made is
"same as we did for the SEO stats campaign."
In short, we checked link&nbsp;profiles of competing
pages,&nbsp;analyzed anchors to create our segments,
and&nbsp;then exported our prospects by segment.
I won't go deeper into this because we have
a 3-part case study on how we did it for SEO
stats post, plus, I've taught the&nbsp;methodology
in our prospecting module.
Alright, so let's fast forward around&nbsp;30
minutes, we end up with a spreadsheet
like this, where we've noted the&nbsp;linkable
points which are the segments,&nbsp;the size
of each segment, and some more
detailed information for reference.
And because our SOP says to add our
sheet as a&nbsp;file to our card, I'll do that.
Now I'll rename it to something
like "Segments/Initial research."
All good!
Time to loop in our outreach&nbsp;manager so
they can start drafting email templates
for each segment.
Done.
Alright, it's time to actually create
our campaign spreadsheet now.
So for this campaign, we'd need to export
all segments from Ahrefs Site Explorer.
And all I would have to do is go to the
backlink profile of a competing page,
search for our segment's footprint&nbsp;within
the anchor and surrounding text,&nbsp;and then
export the report.
All of this&nbsp;research was done in the previous stage.
Now, for this particular campaign, I&nbsp;downloaded
14 reports in Ahrefs Site Explorer,&nbsp;one report per
segment, and created&nbsp;a merged version
of our master sheet&nbsp;with each URL labeled
with their segment.
And&nbsp;in total, we have 5,538 rows in this sheet.
So I'll add our "sheet link" in the custom
field in the Notion Card because the SOP
says to do it, and we're ready to move on.
The next thing I'd do is filter the results.
And I'd start by removing obvious
spam and&nbsp;irrelevant pages.
So that might be URLs from blogspot
or URLs on .ru and .pw domains.
I'd also remove URLs that contain certain
footprints like /job/, /forum/ and a bunch&nbsp;
of&nbsp;others that should be outlined in the SOP.
Finally, I'd deduplicate URLs by
root domain, since we won't want
to contact people from the same website
multiple times on the same campaign.
And Google Sheets has a feature to do this.
Just select your sheet, click on "Data",
hover over "Data cleanup", and hit
"Remove duplicates."
Our data has headers so I'll check that, and
then I'll choose just the root domain column.
Finally, hit "Remove duplicates," and we're done.
But as you can see, we've already done
this&nbsp;and our sheet shrunk from over
5,500 URLs to just over 3,300.
Now, this list is still quite large and there's
probably a lot of URLs in here that we wouldn't
want to get links from.
So this is when&nbsp;I'd start filtering by metrics.
As a hypothetical example, I'm going to
filter&nbsp;for pages that have less than 200
visits to their domain from organic search.
Then I'll delete all of these rows.
And if we remove the filter, you'll see
that we're&nbsp;left with 1,360 prospects.
From a quick scan, most of these pages
look fine&nbsp;from a relevance standpoint.
So the last thing I'm going to do is run our blitz
list to find as many valid emails as we can fast.
And I've already covered how to do this
in lesson 3.3, so feel free to watch that
for more information.
Anyway, here's what our sheet looks like now.
As the prospector, I'm officially done with
this campaign, so I'll hand it off to the vetter
by assigning him in the project management
system&nbsp;and letting him know where I left off.
Then I'll go and pick up my next
project and rinse and repeat.
Alright, let's move on to the vetter.
Now, because we've already found some
valid email addresses in our blitz list,
that's where the vetter is going to start.
So we'll filter for just "valid" email&nbsp;addresses
and we were able to attain this information
by using Neverbounce's API.
Now, George is going to visit each of these
pages and go through our vetting checklist.
And for each URL that matches all criteria,
he'll mark the status down as "Ready."
And for pages that don't match the criteria,
he'll mark them as "Disqualified."
Now, after he's finished going through
the&nbsp;valid blitz list prospects, he's going
to tag the outreach manager to let them
know that&nbsp;the blitz list has been vetted.
And we'll get to the outreach manager a bit.
Now, as for the vetter, they'll likely work on
the next campaign that the prospector has
sent&nbsp;because the point of the blitz list
is to quickly validate how successful
your campaign might be&nbsp;without putting
in all the manual work of finding contacts
and vetting URLs.
But for illustration purposes, let's say
we got a 9.5% conversion rate from
blitz list prospects.
Assuming that was good&nbsp;in our books,
then the campaign is validated.
So&nbsp;the vetter would simply go through all the other
URLs that don't have a valid status and find email
addresses for the ones that are qualified.
Alright, let's move on to
the outreach manager.
Now, we need to rewind a bit here because
the&nbsp;outreach manager's work is dependent
on the prospector's and vetter's deliverables.
So again, before the prospector merged and
cleaned the prospects list, the outreach
manager was given a sheet like this
where the linkable points, or segments,
were&nbsp;outlined along with additional details.
So while the prospector and vetter are doing
their work, the outreach manager will be busy
writing email drafts for each segment and
templating them, just as I had shown you
in lesson 4.3. in the outreach module.
Once they've done this, they'd need to set
up the campaign in their outreach tool.
And this&nbsp;will vary based on the tool you use.
Now, once the vetter pings the outreach manager
to&nbsp;let them know that the blitz list has been vetted,
the outreach manager would go to the sheet,
and export contacts in the "Ready" status.
And in this case, we've built a custom
formula&nbsp;to automatically populate this list.
Now, to avoid accidentally sending the same
person a duplicate email, they're going to
update the sheet and change any status
that's in&nbsp;the "Ready" state to the "Sent" State.
Then they'd upload the export&nbsp;file to
their outreach tool,&nbsp;and go through
the outreach process.
Now, these workflows are guided by the SOPs
and the system makes it possible to work
collaboratively in an organized fashion.
But something to note is that&nbsp;people
work at different paces and with
different levels of experience.
So&nbsp;you're going to have to monitor and optimize
your systems and workflows accordingly.
Now, from an efficiency standpoint, with a team
of 3, you can potentially send hundreds or maybe
even thousands of personalized emails in
a week depending on how strict you are
with vetting&nbsp;and the number
of prospects you have.
Now, while scaling can be exciting, you
shouldn't be using these systems and
workflows to spam people because you'll
just be doing an overly complicated link
building strategy without results
to show for your effort.
Nothing&nbsp;I've taught in this course is a magic
formula and it does take some creativity to
execute successfully.
Take the extra time to vet your prospects,
go&nbsp;the extra mile with personalization even
if your output suffers a bit, and I'm confident&nbsp;
that you'll find the link building process&nbsp;more
effective, efficient, and enjoyable.
And that's a wrap.
Thanks so much for joining me
in this link building course.
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I'll see you in the next tutorial.