A good link building campaign needs to be planned, managed, monitored and reported on. It will use a wide range of strategies with many link prospects for each.

This is a lot of work and Wordtracker's Link Builder tool has been rebuilt to do all these jobs for you. Can all this really be in one tool? Ken McGaffin says it can and here he shows you how.

Find and rank thousands of link prospects

I‘ve been link building professionally for many years now and how I would have liked to have started all my campaign’s as easily as you now can. It’s as simple as this:

• Enter a keyword

• Enter your domain

• Hit ‘Create my link building campaign’

Link Builder will then find thousands of link prospects for you.

Even better, they’ll be organized into 11 categories to match different link building strategies, including blogs, news media, social media, trusted sites, directories, shopping sites, business sites and job sites.

Link builder asks for your domain so it can check which sites already link to you and find new links when they appear. Pretty smart, huh?

Prospects found, you can then see them organized into your different link building strategies …

Plan multiple link building strategies

To rank well on Google you need as many quality links as possible.

But you also need many different types of links to show Google what a naturally well-connected site yours is. Eg, if all your links came from directories that would look unnatural.

Different types of links require different link building strategies. And some strategies will work well for some sites but not others. So again, the more strategies you try, the better your results will be.

Those different link building strategies will need different types of prospect sites to target. Classifying sites for different strategies is a lot of work but Link Builder does the job for you.

The Strategies menu highlighted in the image below shows you 11 different strategies that Link Builder finds you hundreds, even thousands, of prospects for.

You can try Link Builder now on a 7-day free trial

Let’s have a quick look at the different types of sites those Strategies are for and how to use them (Link Builder will provide you with further detailed help) …

Blogs are written by a wide range of people including enthusiastic hobbyists, company CEOs, industry experts and well known journalists.

These link-giving heroes all require a personal approach for example with comments, interviews, reviews and guest posting.

News media sites range from huge nationals like CBSnews.com to The Costal Angler Magazine and anything in between.

All these news media sites (including the likes of The Washington Post, BBC and The New York Times) need people just like you to give them stories. Learn how to tell them yours with Link Builder.

Social media sites include the big guns like Twitter and Facebook as well as much smaller community sites highlighting discussions, comments and debates on news stories, products and companies. They are the quick, easy way to make friends, win links and influence people (thank you Dale).

Job sites promote or comment upon careers, jobs and internships.

Have you even thought about getting links from job sites? No? Well neither have your competitors. The jobs you offer, your experiences as a boss or an employee can all be made link worthy.

Directories and listing sites offer immediate, simple opportunities for links.

These are simple links to get but don’t overdo them. Learn how to write short, benefit-driven descriptions of your business and get yourself listed.

Shopping sites include those writing, advising and commenting on products and the companies that produce them.

Link Builder will give you a myriad of ways to get links from small niches you never knew existed.

Trusted sites have domain names with endings like .gov, .edu and .org. By their nature they are likely to rank well on Google or provide powerful links.

Sound difficult to get? We’ll show you how others have done it. (Discounts for government employees, anyone?)

Business sites include those published by trade associations, business groups (local and national), events and awards.

Of course you can contact these websites online. But you can also use a technique older than the internet - as Larry Chase advised me early in my career: "Ken," he said, "build links offline".

Already linking sites already link to your site.

Link building is about building relationships. And the daftest thing you can do is stop once you've got a link. So pay attention to people who already link to you and see what else you can do together.

Imported links are those you’ve imported with Link Builder’s browser extension when surfing the web.

Studying your marketplace online, your competitors and their inbound links, will always reveal new strategies and opportunities.

Co-linking sites are those within a Link Builder campaign that link to two or more of the sites used as sources for that campaign.

This includes some of the low-hanging fruit of the link building world. Here you'll find prospects that link to multiple sites in your market so getting them to link to you should be easy.

Manage contact with your link building targets

With hundreds of prospects for your different strategies, you need to:

• Choose which prospects you will target

• Get to work building relationships with your targets

• Make notes about any contact with your targets

• Record when you have ‘contacted’ targets or are they are ‘linking to you’ (everybody’s favorite, of course)

You’ll have guessed by now that Link Builder will help you do all this too. Here’s how …

Your prospects will already be in Link Builder sorted by the number of sites that link to them. This is a good first sort to help you choose which prospects to target.

But to really know if a link prospect is worthy of being a target you are going to have to click through and visit the site.

If you like a site then you can mark it as a target by clicking its target icon. See below.

You can also make notes about the site and any contact you make with it.

And you can ask Link Builder to find a site’s contact details for you.

Once you have made contact with a target you can change its status by clicking the ‘contacted icon’ (it’s an envelope).

You can now sort your prospects list (for each of your campaigns) by those which:

• You’ve chosen as targets (or not)

• You’ve contacted (or not)

• Now link to you (or don’t)

Lovely stuff. But wouldn’t it be nice to see graphs that illustrated this and you could use for reports? Actually …

Report on campaign progress

Link Builder gives you a collection of smart graphs to help you visually monitor and report on your campaign’s progress. (You can download these reports as PDFs too, of course.)

The image below shows a campaign’s number of target sites, those contacted, not contacted and linking back.

You can also see how your site’s inbound links are increasing over time:

And how many links your site is getting each month:

A spider graph shows you how your site’s links are spread across different link types:

Such spider profiles immediately show you where you’re weak and where you need to take action to improve. (A few too many directories for our example site’s report above, I think.)

Add new link prospects automatically

Once a week, Link Builder will look for:

• new link prospects for your campaigns

• new links to your site

These new prospects and links will be added to and recorded on your campaign.

You’ll also be sent an email alert with details of the new discoveries. See an example email below:

Report on competitors’ link building strategies

As well as reporting on your own site’s inbound links, you can report on and study your competitors’.

You can see your competitors’ number of cumulative links over time:

You can also see the number of new links your competitors’ are gaining each month:

The ‘spider profile’ reports show you how well your competitors’ links are spread across different types of sites. This highlights your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.

In the spider graph above we can see that Montblanc.com (in red) get many of their links from Shopping sites, News media and Directories. And Cross.com are strongest in shopping sites too but are relatively poor in news media.

Help with step-by-step guides and case studies

Link Builder takes the hard work out of planning, managing and reporting campaigns.

But the hard part is actually contacting link prospects and persuading them to link to you.

So we provide you with all the help you need with a wide range of link building posts in Wordtracker’s Academy.

If there’s any other help you’d like, let us know and we’ll do our best to oblige!

Now try it for free

So it can be done. There really is a tool for link builders that will research, find prospects, plan campaigns, monitor targets, report on competitors’ link profiles and your campaign progress. Link Builder is the tool and you can try it out now for free for 7 days

About Ken McGaffin

Ken McGaffin is an experienced internet marketing consultant and has worked for major pharmaceutical companies, advertising agencies, government bodies and non-profit organizations.

Ken unveils the secrets of successful link building in his 384-page e-book, Successful Link Building

You can watch recordings of his extremely popular (and free) Link Building Webinars

And you can read Ken's articles about keyword research and link building throughout the Academy.