Organizing Your Link Building Campaign – Trello Tuesday

It’s Trello Tuesday again, and this month we’re bringing you a plan to help keep your link building efforts on track.

Whether you’re sending out a small wave of 30 emails promoting a new whitepaper, or managing a massive content campaign involving hundreds of guest posting sites, you need processes and routines to help stay efficient and organized. One of the tools I’ve started using lately to get this accomplished is Trello.

One of the tasks I commonly need help keeping organized is link building. At Heroic Search, we create custom link building campaigns, as well as a la carte link building packages for clients that need extra help building out their link building profile. So as you can imagine, there’s quite a bit to keep up with. While link building is far from a one-size-fits-all task, there are some standard paths that can be built so that you can navigate a campaign successfully. Hopefully the steps outlined in the board below will help you do just that.

How To Use This Board

Imagine that you were starting a link building campaign for a client/boss from scratch, and you’ll have a good idea of how this board was designed. Simply click on each card to see the descriptions and resources on the “back” of it. The colors on each card represent a particular type of discipline along the link building route. Because everyone’s methods and campaigns are going to be different, the board itself is fairly generalized. Feel free to tweak it as much as you like, simply select Options>Copy Board and select which of your own organizations you would like to add it to.

Link Building Campaign Board

Preparation

In the beginning, everything is about preparation. Without it, you may find yourself lost at sea when month 3 of the campaign rolls around because you have no big picture guidance laid out.

The first step to combating this is gathering as much information about the business/website so that you can accurately leverage your marketing knowledge to accomplish goals of the client. Succeeding in doing this properly will help you build the brand in an efficient, accurate, and natural manner.

Strategy

The necessary information has been collected and you should have most of what you need to start planning the details of the link building campaign – now it’s time to start putting your ideas down on paper.

Research, analysis, planning, and various prospecting tasks will be the order of the day; anything that needs to be put in place so that you can hit the ground running upon implementation. You’ll be looking to find strong and weak points in the website you’re promoting, and in your competitors site as well. This will help start you down a good path for developing ideas for content and the campaign as a whole.

Building and Promoting

This is where the magic happens. After all the research, benchmarking, and planning, it all comes down to the actual acquisition. By now you should have some good ideas of what kind of content needs to be created, now it’s time to dive headfirst into content strategy and promotion.

Depending on the size of your campaign, you’re probably going to need the help of some tools so you can remain efficient. Tools like Buzzstream and Ontolo are good choices here.

Measuring

All the work up until this point doesn’t mean much unless you can learn from it and be able to report back clearly to your client/boss on the outcome. Use this stage to look back on the process of the campaign so far, and determine whether or not it’s been successful. You’ll do this by accessing performance and effectiveness of KPIs, business goals, and your own tracking methods.

From here, it’s important to learn from any mistakes or inefficiencies of the campaign. It’s not enough to simply track results – even if you accomplished them. You need to be constantly testing new strategies and methods. Aside from the obvious advantage of gaining professional experience by trying other methods, constant experimenting will help your link building projects to consistently stay ahead of any update.