Building a Team While Link Prospecting

Table of Contents

Intro

Link prospecting is an excellent strategy if you’re looking to get
results, but if you want it to proceed smoothly, then you’ll need a team
on your side. If you’re looking for the best team, you’re going to need
to determine your budget and the amount of work you’ll give them. Since
link prospecting can be challenging, you’ll surely want quality
employees.

Building up links on your own will take a lot of time, and this may not
be the most profitable way to approach it. You’ll need to be able to
distribute the work among multiple people, so you’ll need to get a range
of workers on your team. Along with dividing the work, it will also
ensure that your link building is handled in a structured manner.

You’ll need workers with various skill sets if you’re looking to make
the most of your link building efforts. Having a specialized team is
better than having one person who is a jack of all trades. Start off by
considering the positions you’ll need to fill in your link building
team. These will be based on the work that needs to be done.

There are four main roles in a link building team and these include a
content creator, an outreach manager, a link prospector, and an SEO
lead. This means that you’ll need to assemble a group with a varied set
of skills to make the most of them.

Over the course of this guide, we’re going to address what you need to
know about each of these jobs and the responsibilities that they tend to
take on. We’ll also discuss how you can get in touch with qualified
individuals so that you can hire them.

With the knowledge gained in this guide, you’ll feel confident enough to
go out and assemble your very own A-team of SEO talent for any link
building project.

How to Hire a Link Prospector

You’ll need to start by hiring a link prospector. These workers tend to
be some of the most affordable, so they should be easy to hire for even
smaller SEO firms. You can pay between $4 and $8 per hour for one of
these workers. What a link prospector needs most is the ability to
communicate effectively.

These workers tend to be relatively easy to train because they don’t
need specialized knowledge to accomplish their tasks. In most cases,
link prospectors will have to go out and find the best opportunities for
links as well as conducting some basic research. In most cases, they’ll
have to use search engines like Bing, Yahoo, or Google to find the right
links.

These workers look through search engines to ensure that resource pages,
guest posts, and sponsored pages are suitably visible due to the
algorithm. Link prospectors will also need to take closer looks at
social media pages to ensure that they’re suitable for building links.

While it’s good for a link prospector to know the basics of SEO, they
won’t need any advanced knowledge. As long as the link prospector
understands what goes into making a quality link, they should be
suitable for your business. Test them by seeing if they can acquire both
low- and high-end links for your site.

There are specific skills that your link prospectors will need to have
so that you can be sure that they’re as effective as possible when you
hire them. For example, they’ll need to be able to fix broken links,
round up links in the first place, and more. Other top skills include
administrative abilities, proofreading, and good communication.

You’ll also want to make sure that this worker understands how to use
spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets. This will make it
easier for them to create reports about what they’re doing. They’ll also
have to be able to communicate effectively with other team members as
well as being able to multitask.

How to Hire an Outreach Manager

Outreach managers are the next employees that you’ll want to hire and
this is because they tend to cost you a bit more than lead prospectors.
These crucial employees will be tasked with managing the tasks that your
team is charged with. Some of the key skills for these employees include
editing, writing, and communication skills.

Outreach managers need to be able to communicate and throw together
emails in a matter of minutes. They’ll also need good negotiation skills
because they’re the ones who will be getting in touch with prospects.
You will need someone who is a native speaker and knows quite a bit
about your company in the first place.

Work for these employees usually consists of emailing people that you’d
like to reach out to as well as the creation of personas. The outreach
manager will also be tasked with coming up with outreach templates. You
can pay these workers between $15 and $30 because of the skills they
need. Your rates will vary based on how skilled someone is.

While these workers may not need detailed SEO skills, one who does have
them will be a lot more valuable for your agency. You’ll want to hire
employees who are capable of multitasking to ensure that they can adapt
to multiple roles so that you don’t have to fill out those positions
with other workers. They will also need to abide by deadlines.

Be sure to let the worker know what kind of role they’ll be playing in
your company before you hire them. These workers will even need to be
able to go through content to ensure that it’s properly edited and
proofread before it ends up getting published.

This is in addition to an outreach manager’s responsibilities involving
the management of your team, contacting prospects, and formulating email
replies.

How to Hire Content Creators

If you’re trying to build links and market your agency, you’re also
going to need to hire people to handle your content creation needs. Bad
content will not get an audience to your site. Guest blogging is a huge
part of building up your links, and having poor content will not be
conducive to this.

You’ll need to create content that has no plagiarism and that will allow
you to build a rapport with your audience. While your link prospector,
outreach manager, and SEO lead are key parts of your team, you’ll need
several content creators that will form a writing team.

This is because it’s challenging for a content creator to have a large
enough output to handle projects from every one of your clients. You’ll
also want to make sure that you find enough writers to assign each of
them to a single client to ensure that your content maintains the same
standards.

For example, if you suddenly start working with a new client, you may
want to start recruiting a new writing team to deal with their projects.
You can find them in social media groups, freelancing sites, and more.
You should also make sure that your content writers have prior
experience.

The number of writers that you assign to each client depends on the
amount of work that your clients are giving you. Most SEO firms have
about three writers for each client. You’ll typically want to have one
low-grade writer, one mid-grade writer, and one high-grade writer.

Low-grade writers should be paid between $20 and $30 for every article
that they submit to a client. Mid-range writers should typically get
paid between $30 and $70 for every one of their articles. Finally, your
high-end writers should be making between $70 and $150 for their work.

When recruiting writers, make sure that you get samples from them to
ensure that you know what they can do for you. You don’t want to get
your hands on writers who don’t fulfill your needs. You’ll also want to
make sure that you strike a balance between writers who are freelancers
and those who are in-house.

Tagging Writers

When you’ve hired your content creators, you’ll want to organize all of
the work that a certain client expects from them. You can split this
sheet into tabs so that you can keep track of writer info.

In this sheet, you’ll want to tag the writers based on their quality and
match them up with work that requires that level of quality. You should
also have a column that shows which writer is assigned to which piece of
content so that no confusion results later on in the project.

As you’d expect, you’ll want to ensure that your low-quality writers are
occupied with lower end work, while high-end writers should be assigned
to superior projects.

Remember that your low-end writers should still be knowledgeable in the
field that they’ll be writing in. While their writing may not be the
best, you still want to ensure that they’re producing quality work for
the client that will not ruin their reputation because of bad info.

Using these tags will ensure that writers are always assigned to work
that suits them. Remember that you may have a large number of writers
later on and it may not always be easy to remember which of them is good
at what they do. Keep track of their skill levels with these tags and
you shouldn’t have a problem.

Creating Job Postings on Upwork

There are many sites on which you can find writers to create your
content, and Upwork is one of the most popular. You may have heard of
Upwork being referred to as Elance before they changed their name. You
can find all kinds of different freelancers on Upwork, many of whom
write.

To make a job posting, you profile the kind of task that you’d like a
freelancer to accomplish based on what the client expects from you. Make
sure that you talk about the niche that the post has to be in so that
you can find freelance writers who have expertise in the domain that
you’re operating in.

This will allow you to find the kind of writers that you need for the
quality of the task that you’re looking to accomplish. You should also
let the writers know how long each individual piece will be, though you
don’t have to note the exact word count since that can vary based on the
project.

You can then go into what the writer needs to know so that they can
effectively handle the job. You can usually list these out so that
they’re easier to read and so that the applicant doesn’t gloss over
them.

When writers apply for the job, they should come to you with their
samples as well as a proposal for how they intend to tackle the project.
If they fail to come to you with these things, they likely won’t take
the task as seriously as they can.

Creating Job Postings on Social Media

Social media is another great tool that you can use to find writers, and
there are countless specialized groups on sites like Facebook where you
can find prospective writers. Keep in mind that your posts will have to
be a bit shorter and more direct than the ones you’d put up on Upwork.

Start off by finding the right freelance writing groups on social media
and then put the info that you’d include in an Upwork posting, including
the number and frequency of the articles. You’ll also want to let them
know the average length of a blog post.

There are many different social networks that you can post on, but
Facebook has the largest possible user base. Keep in mind that this will
also result in stiffer competition that could drive up the rates for
prospective writers.

Remember that your content creation process is entirely dependent on the
writers that you hire. Without good writers, you can’t create good
content, and without good content, sites won’t be able to drive traffic
in their direction.

We hope that this guide has helped you build your link prospecting team
effectively.