Choosing and running tactics

By Bill Hartzer · Hartzer Consulting · 25+ years in search, domains and expert witness work

Tactics are the easy part

By this point in the course you know how a link passes value, how to judge whether a linking site is worth having, how to find prospects, and how to write to a person who has no reason to answer you. What is left is the part almost nobody teaches, because it is unglamorous: deciding which tactic to run, in what order, with what resources, and knowing when the thing you are running has failed.

I have watched far more campaigns die of bad management than of bad technique. The outreach was fine. The asset was fine. What went wrong was that someone picked a tactic that did not suit the site, gave it three weeks, measured the wrong number, and concluded that link building does not work. That is a planning failure wearing the costume of a tactical one.

What this module does and does not cover

This module is about campaign management. It does not teach you how to run broken link building, or digital PR, or link reclamation. Each of those has its own reference page in the tactic library, written at the level of detail you need to actually execute it, and repeating that here would only produce two weaker pages instead of one strong one.

What you get here instead is the layer above the tactics:

• Matching — a decision framework that starts with your site, your budget, your team and your risk tolerance, and ends with a shortlist of tactics that suit them.
• Sequencing — an actual 90-day plan, with what happens in which week and what a realistic first quarter produces.
• Workflow — the stages every campaign moves through and the smallest tool set that runs them.
• Scaling — how a one-off project becomes a standing program, and the replacement-rate arithmetic that forces the change.
• Diagnosis — the six specific ways campaigns die, and how to tell which one killed yours.

The one idea to carry through the module

Link building is a rate problem before it is a growth problem. Links do not sit still. On my own profile the median referring domain stops linking after about 1,080 days, and just under half of every link ever recorded is now gone. That happens whether or not you are running a campaign. It means a site with no active link acquisition is not flat, it is shrinking, and a campaign that produces links for one quarter and then stops has bought a temporary reprieve rather than a permanent gain.

Everything in this module follows from that. It is why the 90-day plan ends with a decision about the next 90 days. It is why the workflow is built to be repeatable rather than heroic. And it is why the last lesson in the module is about failure diagnosis, because the campaign you can fix is worth more than the one you replace.

The lessons

1. 7.1Matching tactics to your siteMatch tactics to site type, budget, team and risk before you run anything.
2. 7.2Your first 90-day planA week-by-week first quarter, with honest expectations for what it produces.
3. 7.3Campaign workflow and toolsThe stages of a campaign and the smallest tool set that can run them.
4. 7.4From campaign to programWhy campaigns must become programs, and the decay math that forces it.
5. 7.5Campaign failure modesThe six specific ways campaigns die and how to diagnose which one killed yours.