$100k lessons on link-building

Last year, I spent $100,000 on link-building. I worked with 5 freelancers, 5 agencies & 2 services.

Here are my top learnings on finding a good link-building agency/service/freelancer:

1. Most good link-builders will offer a minimum guarantee of links. They usually claim that they’ll likely get more links than the minimum guarantee.

2. The average guaranteed link costs between $10 – $700 per link. Pricing depends on how small or large your vertical is, domain authority of the target website, relevance, quality of link etc.

3. Don’t go for link-builders that work with publishers with sponsored posts or PBNs or have their own blogs used for link-building. Very spammy and should be avoided as much as possible as it might hurt your site.

4. Don’t let them use your domain for outreach, cold emails hurt your domain’s email deliverability. If that gets affected, your product transactional emails won’t go through too.

5. Always pit two agencies against each other (when you’re finalizing) & work with them together in your first month. That gives you a good benchmark on which agency is better & more cost effective.

6. Always check a month later if the backlinks are still there or not. That’s another problem with some link-building agencies as they offer temporary links.