How We've Built 20,000 Links By Hand

Julie Joyce runs Link Fish Media, a US agency whose staff in North Carolina find and negotiate links by hand, with no automation at all. Over seven years they have built about 20,000 of them, and Julie openly admits the first 10,000 were pretty bad. In this talk she explains what they learned since: why they stopped taking old pages with no authority, networks of sites run by one owner and clients with unrealistic demands.

You'll learn how much time and how many e-mails one link takes, why targeted outreach beats casting a wide net, and how to think about who would ever link to, say, a shop selling rubber boots. Julie shows tools for finding partners and content ideas, a five-step checklist before outreach, the warning signs of bad sites and a do-not-contact database.