The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

6 Actionable Tips to Better Train Your Link Builders

by 

Venchito Tampon

Last updated: February 17th, 2014

Starting your own link building team from scratch requires some diligence and hardwork to get all the link building campaigns done properly and efficiently.

Enabling yourself to provide detailed job descriptions when hiring new members in your team would help you set reasonable expectations for your team.

Though hiring new link builders with a good SEO background could make your training much easier, you have to think creatively on how your link builders can learn the advanced side of link building and get them updated with the latest trends in the search space (to cope up with the SEO changes).

In this post, I’d like to share a few tips on how to effectively train your link builders.

Let’s get started.

1. Explain to them why link building is important.

Gone are the days when link building is performed only for SEO purposes (rankings). These days, building links is commonly associated with other inbound marketing activities like CRO and social media management.

Having a solid understanding of the key benefits of link building could make the link building task a goal-oriented one:

• Helps the site/content gain the top spots of search results for targeted keywords.
• Exposes the brand/content to other websites or to online communities that are relevant to the brand.
• Potentially attracts new customers/clients to the brand by giving useful content pieces focused on solving the top issues in the industry.
• Humanizes the brand when top industry publications feature interviews with the brand’s key stakeholders.

2. Always give them feedback.

Learning link building is easier if you know where to improve. It’s important to provide regular feedback to your link builders. This will allow them to know exactly how to do the link building task correctly and how to make the results more valuable to the target audience.

3. Give them an opportunity to learn.

There are tons of ways to let your link builder learn the basic and advanced side of link building. Here are some of them:

• Reading materials. Curate a list of link building resources for your team. It’s a must to include the basic how-to’s of one link building technique that you’d want to share with them (i.e. what is broken link building) so that they can easily go back to your guide if they miss one out while working.
• Courses. There a few popular link building courses that you can purchase for yourself and for your team. This would make your training much easier, given that that such courses outlines the link building basics your team should be good at. However, some courses may not have the actual application of each of the link building techniques that your team could implement for your campaigns. In this case, you might create tutorial videos to show them how exactly you build links.
• Conferences/Seminars. Since link building is part of SEO, you probably will see presentations discussing link building in SEO conferences or seminars. A great advantage of letting your whole team participate in any of the conferences is that they can start engaging with other folks in the industry which might let them learn new link building tactics from their new friends.
• Offline meetups. If your virtual members are located near your area, you might schedule a monthly meetup for them. This activity can go beyond than just working with them online. It’s easy to instruct someone to whom you can put your trust, and regular meetups can help establish the trust and rapport that you need to unify the team.

4. Teach them to create link building inventories.

There are in fact two link building spreadsheets that you team should create: main spreadsheet and campaign-level spreadsheet. The former includes the hours spent for each campaign, summaries of the monthly link building reports and possible issues that are encountered during the month whereas the campaign-level spreadsheet details each of the campaign’s proposed list of link building techniques and tabs for each of the activities (link prospecting and link building outreach).

You don’t want all of the spreadsheets to be solely created by your link builders. However, you can give them a chance to create a campaign-level spreadsheet when the actual campaign hasn’t started yet. As they learn how to create a link building spreadsheet, they can perform effectively on their task given that they were able to see the whole team’s efforts for the campaign and the level of urgency for each task.

5. Provide a detailed description of each task.

Don’t assume that your link builders know how to do all of the link building work you’ve assigned. It’s important that you always provide a detailed description of the task to get them started quickly. This could also reduce the time that you will spent to look over the task every now and then, since you’re assured that they will do it the right way based on the standards you set for each task from the very beginning.

For instance, you want your link builder to perform a competitive backlink analysis using a link tracking tool. You might need to include the results that you want to see from that task (i.e. a list of the most common types of linkable asset of your competitors and the estimated number of links gathered for each asset – in general). Even if you don’t how much hours he spent for that specific task, you’re rest assured of the quality of work he is able to produce.

6. Don’t be afraid to see them fail.

It’s normal for your new members to commit mistakes when building links. Remember that training is a process and it needs you to be patient with how they work and how they perform each link building task.