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.
