How to sell linkbuilding?

[TheReference]

Howdy SEOmoz,

I was wondering what your approach is in selling linkbuilding to clients (we're an agency).

• Do you sell it as "linkbuilding" or more like content creation/content marketing?
• do you bill by the hours, instead of project based?
• How would you calculate the number of hours required? (I know "it depends" :-), but still some insights would be cool)
• Do you start immediately with more creative strategies (widgets, infographics)?

I'm really looking forward in learning how you guys tackle this.

Best regards,

Nik

[freestone]

Have you ever known anyone to do linkbuilding (or SEO for that matter) on a revenue share/commission basis.  I have not heard of this being done but it seem that a good Link Builder would not be afraid of having more upside rather than a fixed amount of money with no skin in the game.

The one downside to this is how is this measured.  Does the client decided?  Does the client show the books and averages the last years revenue and anything over that average is share profit at say 80/20 .

My focus is strictly e-commerce sites.

[JordanGodbey]

Hi Nik,

We work on a very holistic approach where we seek to deeply understand the client in their current situation and what they want to get out of working with us (which is (usually)... more revenue!)

So, you want to sell a benefit, not a tactic.

Link building is a tactic (that "anyone" can do), you want to sell "increased revenue", and how will you do that? With link building

See the difference? It's small but makes a big difference.

Remember, people don't really want to buy a drill, they want to buy a whole in their wall, but the drill is what does it.

Many people will measure links built, or rankings, or whatever else -- and those things are great -- but at the end of the day, all of that stuff boils down to a simple question : Did we make more money because of the work you did, yes or no? If no, they probably won't want to work with you much longer, no matter how many great links you've built.

It's the dilemma of connecting the business side to the technical side.

When doing a proposal, we look at the competition and see how far behind our client is. Then we do some estimates as to what we would need to do to out rank them and come up with a total amount of work.

At that point we can gauge it to the clients budget.

For example, if we think it's going to be 6 months at $4K per month, and they can only do $2K per month, then we would do "half" the work we planned on per month, and stretch the timeline out to 12 months.

Same amount of work, but the client controls the timeline based on the budget.

There is a limit however, if the client wanted to spend all $24K in the first month, we wouldn't be able to complete everything and get the rankings so you have to space it out realistically.

Remember to build into your costs some of the "meta" work like reporting, calls, link outreach, getting content created etc.

Hope some of that helps.