How a link building campaign runs, from prospect list to live link

A link building campaign is a sequence of ten steps: goal, prospect list, vetting, contacts, sending setup, pitch, follow-up, terms and content, live checks, and tracking. The order matters, because each step filters the work of the next one. Skip vetting and you pitch link farms. Skip the live check and you report links that Google cannot see.

This lesson describes one campaign built on outreach. The same gates apply if you buy placements, with a purchase in place of a pitch.

The ten steps at a glance

Step	What you do	What you measure
1. Goal	Pick target pages, a link reason and a budget	Links needed per page
2. Prospect	Build the list of sites and pages	Prospects added
3. Vet	Remove weak and irrelevant sites	Share of list rejected
4. Contacts	Find and verify an address per prospect	Bounce rate
5. Setup	Prepare the sending domain and mailbox	Spam complaint rate
6. Pitch	Send by tier, personalised	Reply rate
7. Follow up	One or two reminders	Positive reply rate
8. Agree	Terms, content, anchor, target URL	Conversion to link
9. Check	Quality checks before and after publication	Share passing first time
10. Track	Log, check indexing, report	Live and indexed at 90 days

Steps 1 to 3: goal, list and vetting

Start with the pages that need links and the reason anyone would link to them. One campaign should have one link reason, such as a data study to cite or broken links to replace, because the reason shapes both the list and the email.

Then build the list and cut it. Link prospecting explains the sources. Vetting is where most of the list should go: BuzzStream’s June 2026 study rated 96.2% of roughly 257,000 guest post sellers as low quality. Record a score or a pass and fail note for every site, using the method in how to vet a publisher.

Steps 4 and 5: contacts and sending setup

Find the person who can edit the page and verify the address, as set out in finding contacts and verifying emails.

Sending setup is easy to skip and expensive to get wrong. The usual practice among outreach teams is a separate domain or subdomain for outreach, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC records in place, a warm-up period of two to four weeks, and 30 to 50 sends per mailbox per day. These are working methods, not published rules. The hard limit that is published comes from the mailbox providers: since February 2024 Google and Yahoo have required bulk senders to keep spam complaints under 0.3%.

Steps 6 and 7: pitch and follow up

A pitch needs three things: one line that proves you read the page, the exact place the link would go, and the benefit to the reader. Link outreach emails has the detail.

Expect low numbers. The Backlinko and Pitchbox study of 12 million emails, published in 2019, found an 8.5% reply rate. BuzzStream’s 2025 platform data across 51 million emails is reported at 3.59%. Hunter’s outreach guide, updated in April 2026, reports that about 1.3% of prospects end as a link.

Two findings from the 2019 study still shape practice. A personalised email body raised replies by 32.7%, and a single follow-up raised them by 65.8%. Send one or two follow-ups, three to five working days apart, each with something new. More than two invites spam complaints.

Volume does not rescue a weak pitch. BuzzStream’s April 2025 analysis of 31 million emails found that campaigns of 1,001 to 5,000 emails had a reply rate 68% lower than campaigns of 1 to 50.

Step 8: agree terms and content

Replies fall into four groups: yes, no, a request for something in return, and a price. The third is common and often reasonable, such as a quote, a better resource or a share in your newsletter. The fourth needs a decision that belongs to policy, not to the person sending emails. See what to do when a site asks for money.

When a placement involves new content, write down the target URL, the anchor text, the link attribute and any labelling before work starts. A placement brief holds all of it on one page. For a guest post, the editor’s guidelines come first and your brief second.

Step 9: checks before and after publication

Two gates catch most problems.

Before publication:

• The publisher’s vetting result is recorded and above your threshold.
• The target URL returns a 200 status, is indexable and has the correct canonical.
• The anchor is within your policy.
• The draft is accurate and carries no competitor link.
• Any price and terms are confirmed in writing.

After publication, within two days:

• The page is live on the agreed domain and section.
• The link is in the rendered page, points to the right URL and has the agreed attribute.
• The page is not set to noindex, is not blocked in robots.txt and has a correct canonical.
• The page looks the same when fetched with a Googlebot user agent.
• The article can be reached through the site’s own navigation.
• A screenshot and an archive copy are saved.

If the link is wrong or missing, return it to the publisher and hold any payment. A 48-hour deadline for that is a sensible house rule.

Step 10: track, index and report

Log every link with its date, source page, target, anchor, attribute and cost. Then check that Google has indexed the page, because a link on an unindexed page passes nothing. A standard routine is to check at day 7, 14 and 30, ask the publisher for an internal link at day 14, and treat day 45 as the point to ask for a replacement. How to track backlinks covers the tools.

Report on four levels: input (prospects, pitches, spend), process (reply rate, conversion), output (new referring domains, links to priority pages, cost per link) and durability (share still live and indexed at 90 and 365 days).

How long it takes

The time from first contact to a live link is the middle of the process only. Add time for list building, vetting and warm-up at the front and for indexing checks at the back. Four to eight weeks for a first full campaign is a reasonable working estimate, not a measured figure.

Where to go next

Run one small campaign end to end before scaling. If you plan to use a platform to manage the steps, the outreach tools comparison lists the options. Terms such as referring domain and canonical are in the glossary.