TheFirstNinetyDaysofaLinkCampaign

Most link campaigns are judged at ninety days, and most of them look like failures at ninety days even when they are going exactly to plan. Setting the expectation correctly at the start is a larger part of this job than the outreach is.

Nothing gets pitched. The existing profile gets mapped, the pages that matter commercially get identified, and — most importantly — anything already damaging gets found before we add to it. Building onto a profile with an unresolved problem in it is pouring water into a bucket with a hole.

Roughly one engagement in four turns up something here that changes the plan entirely. Twice it has meant the first quarter became clean-up and no new links were built at all.

The slowest visible part and the one clients most want to skip. Building a list of a few hundred candidates and putting each through vetting produces, at the usual one-in-nine rate, a pitch list in the low dozens.

Overlapping with prospecting, this is the part with no template: finding what this client actually knows that a publication would want. Usually it is operational data nobody internally thought was interesting, because to them it is just Tuesday.

Almost every good angle I have used was something the client mentioned in passing and did not think was worth writing down.

Pitches go out in small batches so the angle can be adjusted on real responses rather than after a hundred failures. Accepted pieces are written, then sit in an editorial queue for two to six weeks, which is outside anyone's control.

First placements typically go live somewhere between week nine and week twelve. Ranking movement follows those by another six to ten weeks, which puts the first honest read at around month five.

• Was anything broken found and fixed? The audit either de-risked the account or confirmed it was clean.
• Is there a vetted pitch list, and how big? This is the asset the rest of the year runs on.
• What is the reply rate? The earliest honest signal of whether the angle is landing.
• How many pieces are in an editorial queue? Accepted-but-unpublished is real progress and it is invisible in every tool.

Rankings are not on that list, and a campaign that has rankings to show at ninety days usually did something at week two that will need undoing at month eighteen.