Your first 90-day plan

Lesson 35 of 50Module 7 · Choosing and running tactics6 min read

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

Why the quarter is the right unit

A month is too short to produce a result, and a year is too long to learn anything from. Ninety days is roughly the smallest window in which a link campaign can complete a full cycle: build a list, build something worth linking to, contact people, wait for them, follow up, and count what came back. Anything shorter and you are measuring the response time of other people's inboxes rather than the quality of your work.

The plan below assumes one person working part time, or a small team sharing the work. It assumes you have chosen one or two tactics using the framework in the previous lesson and have read the relevant tactic pages for method. And it assumes the site has something to promote, or that you are prepared to create it in weeks 3 and 4.

The single most important structural feature of the plan is that outreach does not begin until week 5. Almost every failed first campaign I have reviewed started sending email in week 1. The prospect list was unqualified, there was nothing to point at, and the first hundred contacts were spent learning things that two weeks of research would have taught for free. You get one chance to write to most of these people. Do not spend it on a rehearsal.

Weeks 1 and 2: research only

Nothing is sent in these two weeks. The output is a qualified prospect list and a clear idea of what you are going to offer.

• Map the existing profile. Export your current referring domains and take a snapshot with the date on it. You will compare against this later, and it is the only way to know what the campaign actually added.
• Run a link gap analysis. Pull the referring domains of three to five competitors and find the domains that link to several of them and none to you. That intersection is the highest-quality prospect source available to a new campaign, because those sites have already demonstrated they link to businesses like yours.
• Qualify every row. Relevance first, then whether the page is alive and indexed, then metrics. A prospect list that has not been qualified is a list of addresses, not prospects.
• Find the person. Names, not contact forms, for as much of the list as you can manage. This is slow work and it is the work that decides your reply rate.
• Decide the offer. What are you asking them to link to, and why would their reader be better off for it? If you cannot answer the second half, week 3 has a problem to solve.

A realistic output for two weeks is somewhere between 80 and 250 qualified prospects for a small team. Fewer than that and the quarter will not produce enough attempts. Many more than that and you have probably stopped qualifying.

Weeks 3 and 4: build the thing

Now you build whatever the outreach points at. Depending on the tactic that might be a replacement resource for a set of dead links, an original data piece, a genuinely better reference page on a topic your prospects already cite, or a tool. The requirement is not that it be expensive. The requirement is that a reasonable person, looking at it, would understand why someone would link to it without being asked.

Two disciplines make this fortnight work. First, build for the prospect list you actually have, not for an imagined audience. If your list is thirty regional trade associations, the asset should serve their members, and a general industry think piece will not. Second, finish it. A half-built asset with a placeholder chart is worse than a smaller asset that is complete, because the first email you send is the one that gets the most attention it will ever get.

If you are running a reclamation tactic, this fortnight is shorter and looks different: you are assembling the evidence for each request rather than creating something new. Use the spare time to extend and re-qualify the prospect list, or to prepare the second wave, but do not use it to start sending. The sequence is the point.

Weeks 5 to 12: outreach

Eight weeks of correspondence, run at a pace you can sustain. For a part-time operator that usually means 15 to 30 first contacts a week, each one written for the person receiving it, with follow-ups layered on top as the weeks accumulate.

• Weeks 5 and 6. Send the first wave. Keep it small, perhaps a quarter of the list, so that you can change the pitch before you have burned the whole thing. Watch what gets answered and what gets ignored.
• Week 7. First follow-ups begin arriving on top of new first contacts. This is where the workload doubles and where people quietly stop following up. Do not.
• Weeks 8 to 10. Steady state. New contacts, first follow-ups, second follow-ups. Revise the pitch as you learn. Record every outcome, including the refusals, because the pattern in refusals tells you whether the problem is the offer or the list.
• Weeks 11 and 12. Stop adding new first contacts around week 11 and let the follow-ups complete. Links from earlier waves start appearing in this period, and some will appear after the quarter has closed.

Expect a long tail. A meaningful share of the placements from a first campaign land in weeks 10 to 16, which is one reason a quarter measured strictly at day 90 always looks worse than the campaign really was.

What a good first quarter actually looks like

Here is the number nobody wants to publish. For most sites, a competently run first quarter produces something in the range of 5 to 15 genuine referring domains. Not links, domains. Not mentions, links. That is a good result, not a disappointing one.

It sounds small because the industry has trained people to expect otherwise, and because link counts inflate so easily. One sitewide placement can turn five domains into thousands of links and a dashboard that looks like a triumph. On my own profile the top hundred referring domains account for 84.3% of every link ever recorded, and a single domain contributed 16.8% of the total from what was, editorially, one decision by one person. Count domains and the picture stays honest.

Some qualifiers. A digital PR campaign that lands one large story can beat that range in a week and then produce nothing for two months, so judge lumpy tactics over two quarters rather than one. A site with existing brand mentions can exceed it easily through reclamation, because the work is collection rather than persuasion. And a brand new site with no coverage, no data and no relationships may land at the bottom of the range or below it, which is normal and not a reason to change tactic after one attempt.

Week 13: the decision

At the end of the quarter you have four pieces of evidence: the number of new referring domains, the reply rate, the conversion rate from reply to link, and the pattern in refusals. Those four numbers answer the only question that matters at week 13, which is what to do next.

• Reply rate healthy, conversion healthy. Repeat with a larger list. The method works; scale the input.
• Reply rate healthy, conversion poor. People will talk to you but will not link. The asset is the problem, not the outreach. Rebuild it.
• Reply rate poor. The list or the pitch is wrong. Re-qualify a sample of the list before rewriting anything, because a good pitch to the wrong people looks identical to a bad pitch.
• Nothing at all. Go to the failure modes lesson and work through the six causes in order rather than switching tactic on instinct.

Whatever the answer, do not treat the quarter as finished work. The next lesson covers the workflow that makes the second quarter cheaper than the first, and the lesson after that explains why stopping entirely leaves you going backwards.