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The ones that give publishers something they actually want.

Content. Reason to link. Or an asset worth citing as part of their own article.

If it can be bucketed into one of those three categories then chances are there’s a link building strategy around it that works.

Guest posting. Broken link building. Original data.

Stuff that falls outside of those groups? Well just because it might have worked ten years ago doesn’t mean it’s useful today.

Directory Submissions. Comment Links. Forum Signatures.

Unless they have legitimately useful content these links do nothing today.

Links aside, you can read our complete guide to proven link building strategies here.

Of course you can.

Just expect you’re going to be trading hourly rates for vendor rates. And the vendor’s rates always look better than they should.

Broken link building, Outreach campaigns and HARO can all be done without paying a penny. They do however require you send a significant number of emails.

Volume equals hours.

Emails require prospects. How many qualified prospects you can generate from hour x of research time determines how cheap your programme can be.

Got an hour a day to send emails? A realistic broken link building campaign with that budget might send 300 emails to land 8 links.

Want someone else to do the outreach for you? Most reputable agencies will charge you $200+ per hour including that admin time. Now work out how ‘free’ that broken link campaign really is.

Head on over to our link building guide that covers free backlinks to find out which tactics are still worth chasing, and which have long since been outreach saturated.

Any piece of content created with links in mind.

Original research. Industry surveys. Free tools. Truly comprehensive guides.

If it’s something that gives a writer a reason to link to you as part of the natural flow of their article, it’s a linkable asset.

Feel like taking a guess? Try asking yourself this: Would a journalist include this link if I didn’t ask?

If the answer is no. Doesn’t matter how good it is. Content, not asset.

Assets don’t just change the ROI on individual links. They change the economics of link building as a whole.

One well promoted asset can earn you links for years. Outreach stops the second you stop mailing people.

You find pages on Google that link to something that no longer exists. Offer them a replacement resource. Often you’ll get the link.

Broken link building works because you are offering someone a solution to a problem they already care enough about to Google.

Site owners don’t go hunting for their own broken links. They find out when somebody tells them. That somebody may as well be you.

You’re also only going to land a link 5-10% of the time. That’s low. Which means you either need to accept a volume approach, or be really picky about your targets.

Lastly, the tricky part isn’t finding links that no longer work. Any decent SEO tool can do that.

The real challenge is having something genuinely worth swapping in once you’ve found one.

Creating a list of websites you want to eventually link to you.

Finding links is hard. Pitching random links at the hope they’ll embed is even worse.

Prospecting properly should take into account topic alignment, actual organic traffic, a history of linking out, and actual named people to email.

Scraping every website above a DR 30 and calling it link prospecting is how you end up with reply rates of 2%.

Time spent prospecting links compounds. Everything after that is wasted if you don’t have a solid roster of sites you want links from.

Automated outreach sends more emails. Which means volume leads to more links.

Manual outreach doesn’t have the numbers, but it converts better.

The happy medium is using automation to do the heavy lifting, then manually crafting the actual email that hits the send button.

Sequence your automation so you write the first line of every email yourself. That way when the editor realises your email went to 400 other sites, at least your reply rate hasn’t already plummeted.

Email subject lines. Follow up sequences. Personalised email openings.

Automation gets you those numbers. You finish the job.

We cover how to combine both approaches to max out your results in our manual outreach vs automation link building post.

Our guide to outreach link building covers how to actually write the emails that won’t get deleted unread once you’ve got a prospect list built.

Between 3-6 months.

But that time is broken into three phases.

Time to acquire the link.
Time for Google to discover & index that link.
And finally. How long it takes Google to move the rankings needle.

Good campaigns get killed at month two because nobody is patient enough to wait that long.

You should expect marketing teams to struggle to sit still that long. So do yourself a favour next time and show them the metrics that predict ranking changes. Before the actual rankings change.

Link building metrics that actually move brands forward is something we cover in our link building campaign measurements guide.