First off I want to preface this post with a little warning. I’m by no means an SEO expert. In fact, I’m a newbie to the game. I only have about six months of real Internet marketing under my belt (although in online time I suppose that would equate to a few years of real world experience.) Many people might shrug me off because of my lack of experience but I think it’s actually something I can use to my advantage. I spend a few hours every day, in addition to my time at the office every week, learning about the SEO/SEM industries and absorbing everything that I can. Many of my ideas are ridiculous but because I’m not set in my ways yet it’s easy to for me to see things from a fresh perspective, be that good or bad.

In my current position, link ninja according to Jim Boykin, I’ve noticed lots of things that really sucked right off that bat. The number one thing that made me mad was the conversion rate I was seeing on emails for link buys. I’m not exactly sure but I would guess the response rate was in the 1-2% neighborhood, and that’s just responses—not deals. We tried to deal with this problem in many ways: more personalized emails, less formal emails, emails without a mention of links at all, and so on and so forth. I asked about using the phone in the process but it was generally played down because of the drag on time and general bulkiness of the process with the phone involved.

I spent a month working from home in December and I decided to throw the phone into the mix and got the ok from my superior. The results were amazing in my opinion. I easily doubled or tripled my deal flow for any given week. Things moved faster and definitely smoother. I admit that the phone is a bit of a pain, especially when I get calls while I’m not working, but it’s totally worth it. The phone not only helped do deals faster but it also increased my response rate because people knew I was real, not some spamming robot. One little sentence in my emails showed people I was legit.

The phone makes perfect sense in the industries we compete in. Both of these verticals tend to be made up of mom and pop site owners with bad to decent sites. These sites are our goldmines because they are content heavy in many cases and don’t include some of the pizzazz that generally causes site owners to think a link on their site is worth hundreds of dollars every month. The funny thing about it is this: these mom and pop people run websites but they don’t like to correspond be email! WTF? But that’s another discussion for another day. The phone makes such a perfect compliment to our link building strategy because it is so suited to these people. I can get personal, make a connection, and usually talk them way down.

To wrap it up I figured I would walk you through a typical deal involving the phone. First off I send out a bunch of emails to the niche we are targeting. Wait a few days. The next step is combing through everyone’s request and prioritizing or sorting based on his or her timeline/interest. I call site owners, introduce myself, and show them our amazing site and they are always impressed. We chat about our business for a couple minutes, don’t worry I don’t give out anything more than I would in a BS email, and I ask what they might charge for a link on page “x.” Some people quote me really high prices and others really low. At this point, usually I’ve made a good enough connection that I can talk the really ambitious folks way down. From then on it’s just details and I get it wrapped up in another email or call. The bottom line is the phone is critical for two reasons—legitimacy and the ability to create a seemingly personal connection. It may not work for your industry but I would at least consider giving it a shot and analyzing what it does to your conversion rates. Happy link building!