I'm hiring a link building company - need help choosing

[TylerAbernethy]

I asked this question before and got mixed feedback.

Companies vs. Freelancers.

Well I have a couple questions here. At a certain point it is definitely worth going in house, but what about the knowledge that we could gain from working with a big agency?

Does that really add any value? Can I hire a freelancer and trust him as much as a big agency?

or vice versa?

Can I hire an agency and trust them as much as a freelancer?

I have also been advised to make sure they offer competitive / site analysis as a first step, AND inform you of exactly how many links they plan to build per month, how much time they will dedicate to you and your account, expect turn around times, and light strategy details that they would likely use.

Thanks for any help!

TA

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Tyler

I have to disagree with most of the responses here to some extent. Link building as in, here is $100 get me 10 PR4 links is over but link earning is far from over.

Content, content, content - we have all heard that but too many folks put stuff out there that gets no links and very few social shares so developing a strategy that helps you identify the kind of content that gets linked to along with the actual people who do the linking and building a content + outreach strategy can be very effective.

Think about this:

• Identify the kind of content in your industry that gets links
• make a list of all the people that link to it
• make a list of all possible influencers that can help promote your content to their network
• build a relationship with the influencers
• build content that is highly linkable and better than or unique to what was out there
• outreach to the people that linked to other content similar (but not as good of course)
• outreach to the influencers to share your content
• guest post on influential site(s) to get more eyes on your content (and win more links)

Basically, the age old buying of links is dead and buried (good riddance) but there are still some very cool strategies revolving around content generation and the effective marketing of that content to a wider audience of people who will link to it.

Following a long term approach like this you also look to build a broader network of contacts in the social networks and blogger buddies. Once you get to this point, where you share their content, they share yours etc then picking up links should be easy.

I have a client that put out a fairly cool but ultimately pedestrian piece of content last week and picked up over 30 links to it from the Blogosphere. All highly relevant sites with readership so there is a referral value as well but could you imagine trying to buy these 30 links? Lets say you went with some fairly low rate guest posting service at say $100 per post you are looking at $3000 - if you are doing this each week then $12000.

So, whilst there was some initial pain and investment in content and strategy the return on the investment downstream is beyond compare when looked at in a pay X for a link approach. It is also pretty much unbeatable and hard to duplicate by your competition so if you want to play hard and can settle in for a six month + program then you can get some real benefit from working with someone with some real link building smarts.

Hope that helps buddy.

Marcus

[ThatKwameGuy]

Great content will get you links from your actual target market if it is done correctly. Save your money with the link building company and spend it building compelling content and then distributing it.

[edwardrj]

Traditional "link-building" is dead. Guest posting can still be very viable if done right.

[Bryan_Loconto]

The days of link building are over. The days of creating content that help the users find what they are looking for efficiently are here. If you give the user what they are looking for they are more likely to bookmark your site or link to it for reference.

[goodlegaladvice]

... this is a very hard situation both a freelancer and an agency can be a bad idea...

The Problem is:  If they are advertising link building they probably have multiple clients.  And your links are being put in the same places as 10 other peoples that turns into instant link spam...

Best bet Hire someone who only works for your site give him some good content to work with than let him build links with that just for you.  These will last longer and they are worth more...