Hiring

Introduction

This is the part of the curriculum that covers buying. Most people who learn link building properly do not end up doing all of it themselves. They end up briefing somebody, evaluating a proposal, approving an invoice, or deciding whether to hire at all — and those are skills in their own right, taught almost nowhere, because the people best placed to teach them are the people selling.

Why a course about doing the work includes a section about buying it

Because the alternative is dishonest by omission. A course that teaches you to build links yourself, and stops there, quietly implies that everybody who reads it will go and do that. Almost nobody does all of it. The in-house marketer ends up hiring an agency for digital PR. The consultant subcontracts outreach. The site owner reads eight modules, correctly concludes that this is a full-time job, and goes looking for somebody to do it. At that point every hour spent learning to judge a link becomes an hour spent judging a vendor instead, and the second skill is worth more money than the first.

There is also a structural reason. Buyer education is the one category of link building content the market cannot produce for itself. Agencies write it, and an agency explaining how to evaluate an agency is writing a description of itself. Tool vendors write it, and it ends in a signup. Nobody with no dog in the fight has any commercial reason to write it at all, which is exactly why it belongs in a free course rather than in a brochure.

So these pages are written as buyer education. Not as a pitch, not as a comparison chart with an affiliate link at the bottom, and not as a warning that all agencies are bad. Plenty are good. The problem is that from the outside, a good one and a bad one produce identical-looking proposals, and the difference only becomes visible eighteen months later in your backlink profile.

When hiring is genuinely the right call

Three situations, and in all three the answer is clear rather than marginal:

• You need a capability you cannot build in the time available. Digital PR is the clearest case. Getting a story into national or trade media depends on knowing which journalist covers what, what their deadline looks like, and what a usable comment sounds like — relationships and reflexes built over years. If your window is one campaign, you are not going to build that from module 6 alone. Buy it.
• You have the budget but not the headcount, and you have somebody in-house who can judge the work. This is a capacity problem, not a knowledge problem. You know what a good link looks like, you simply cannot send four hundred qualified emails a month yourself. Hiring works here precisely because you can tell whether what comes back is any good.
• You need a bounded diagnostic with a document at the end. A link profile audit, a manual action recovery, a disavow review, link reclamation after a migration. The scope is finite, the deliverable is written, and you can evaluate it on its merits when it arrives. Engagements that end in a document are far easier to buy safely than engagements that end in a monthly link count.

When it is not

Two situations where hiring reliably goes wrong, and both are common:

• You cannot yet tell a good link from a bad one. If you cannot evaluate the output, you are not buying link building, you are buying a report about link building. Every incentive in the engagement then points toward whatever is cheapest to produce and easiest to put in a spreadsheet, which is the exact profile of the tactics graded high risk on this site. Learn enough of module 2 to score a link before you sign anything. It takes an evening and it is the highest-return evening in this whole course.
• The site is not ready to be linked to. If there is nothing on the site a reasonable editor would cite — no data, no tool, no distinctive point of view, no reason to exist beyond selling the thing you sell — then outreach has nothing to offer and the vendor will find that out in week three. What happens next is the problem: rather than tell you, most vendors quietly substitute placements they control for the editorial links they cannot get. You pay for outreach and receive inventory. Fix the asset problem first; it is cheaper and it is yours to keep.

What a good engagement looks like structurally

Ignore the deck and look at the shape of the arrangement. Good ones tend to share these features:

• A discovery or audit phase before any acquisition. Anybody who can quote a monthly link volume before looking at your profile is quoting from a rate card, not a plan.
• A written strategy that names tactics. Not "high-authority placements" but "resource page outreach, broken link building and two data studies." If a proposal will not name the tactic, that is the finding.
• Named people, and a clear answer about subcontracting. Ask directly whether the outreach is done in-house or by a partner. White label arrangements are not automatically bad, but you should know who is emailing on your behalf.
• Forecasts as ranges, with the conversion assumption shown. Prospects contacted, response rate, placement rate. A range is a sign somebody has modeled it; a fixed number is a sign somebody has removed the uncertainty by removing the editorial decision.
• Full disclosure of every live URL, every month. Not a count, not a screenshot: the URLs, so you can look at them.
• An explicit line on what is earned and what is placed. Both can be legitimate. Being unable to say which is which is not.
• You own the accounts, the data and the prospect list. When the engagement ends, the work should stay with the site rather than walk out with the vendor.
• An exit that includes handover. Notice period, final report, list of contacts and relationships built. Vendors rotate; the profile does not.

What is in here

• What link building costs — described structurally rather than in figures that go stale. What actually drives the price of a link, why an outreach link costs a multiple of a directory submission, what a retainer buys that a per-link purchase does not, and why the cheapest quote in a set of three is usually cheap for a reason you can name once you know what to look for.
• Link building packages explained — how packages are constructed, what the tiers usually contain, and how to read the delivery guarantee, which is the single most informative line in most proposals.
• How to evaluate an agency — the questions that produce useful answers, the samples to ask for, and how to check the work they show you.
• White label link building — what it is, why the agency you hired may not be the party doing the work, and what that means for quality control and for accountability.
• Red flags in a proposal — the specific language patterns that tell you what is really being sold, including the vocabulary used to describe tactics from the placed category without naming them.
• DIY versus hiring — an honest comparison, including the cases where hiring is clearly correct and the cases where it clearly is not.

This section names no vendors and recommends none

Read every page in here and you will not find a single agency, marketplace, seller or service named, ranked or linked. That is deliberate and permanent.

A recommendation would be worthless within a year — teams change, the good account manager leaves, the agency is acquired and the quality bar moves overnight — and it would be unverifiable by you in the meantime, since you cannot see what any vendor is actually doing for its other clients. Worse, a list of recommended vendors is the single easiest thing on a site like this to sell, and the moment it exists every word around it becomes suspect. So there is no list, there is no directory, there are no affiliate links anywhere on this site, and nobody has paid to be mentioned or omitted.

What you get instead is the ability to run the evaluation yourself, which outlasts any list I could publish. If somebody sends you a page recommending link building vendors, ask what the publisher earns when you click it. The answer is usually available and usually explains the ranking.

The principle underneath all six pages

Guaranteed volume and editorial quality are in tension, and any proposal that promises both at a fixed monthly number has resolved that tension somewhere you cannot see. Real outreach has a conversion rate the vendor does not control, which means honest delivery forecasts come with ranges rather than guarantees. A vendor promising exactly twenty links a month, every month, is either buying them, placing them on inventory they control, or has a definition of "link" that will disappoint you. Ask which. The answer, or the lack of one, tells you most of what you need to know.

The second principle: you are the one who keeps the site. Vendors rotate. Whatever is done to your link profile stays with you, and the cleanup lands on your budget years later. That asymmetry is the reason buyer education belongs in a link building course rather than in a sales brochure.

Hartzer Consulting does this work, and I have put that here once, where it is relevant, and nowhere else on the site.