Outsourcing " White Hat " scalable link building - can it work

[Whitey]

Have members experienced any success in terms of scaling good ROI from outsourcing their white hat link building services?

What tactics and process' were engaged that made it cost effective for you to outsource it, rather than engage in the process' yourself?

Did they apply "tools" more effectively than you could have done?

I guess I'm talking quality rather than quantity.

[CainIV]

I can only speak as one that helps others build links for their businesses.

Most people do not have the manpower, tools or understanding of the complexity of angles and approaches to build white hat links to scale.

Of course it is and can be done, but the ones that are doing it, command good money for their services.

[Whitey]

command good money for their services

Implying good ROI, i assume.

.....so how do they demonstrate or guarantee their capability. Or put it another way, how do they win their pitch and therefore what should a business be looking for and requiring in an enterprise link building service?

[Planet13]

.....so how do they demonstrate or guarantee their capability. Or put it another way, how do they win their pitch and therefore what should a business be looking for and requiring in an enterprise link building service?

If I am going to use ANY service (SEO or advertising) I want to see testimonials. And if it is SEO, then you can confirm more or less by where they are (currently) in the rankings.

If the company that wants my money says, "Well, our clients prefer to remain unknown," then I would be worried.

I want companies whose service is SO GOOD that their clients are DELIGHTED to promote them.

[CainIV]

ROI is a measure of brand, value and traffic - combined - as it relates to SEO. It has nothing to do with rankings. Poorly branded highly ranked companies go bankrupt everyday. Conversely, well targeted, niche companies grow even without incredible positioning...

To me, link building is really content marketing, or inbound branding. Think of the idea of branding a business first, and then "checking" to ensure you get any kind of citation / link out of it later.

This type of "link building" reflects brand, not SEO.

Scalability is just a matter of increasing the pace at which one handles bottlenecks within any process flow.

The bottle neck in brand links is prospecting. Tons of tools out. We developed our own as we were tired of the pricing on the marketplace.

Companies that align themselves with brand-centric marketing win pitches by thinking as a brand. They act, breathe as a brand would.

SEO is not a segment of what they do.

Branding is what they do. And great link building now is only really a subset of great branding.

[Whitey]

@CainIV - the arrival of Penguin after the opening of this post can only accelerate your thinking, coupled with Panda's never ending need for superior quality.

It's going to take some good thinkers to get their heads around this. It looks more like a highly targeted PR-branding /SEO-link supervised proposition.

[CainIV]

the arrival of Penguin after the opening of this post can only accelerate your thinking, coupled with Panda's never ending need for superior quality.

Actually, to be very honest, Penguin just made things easier for white hat scalable linkers who use prospecting methods since most of those types of links support brand, and there are less generic websites competing for the top spots.