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Used to blast 40 guest posts a month through a broker, now I pitch 3 sites a week by hand | Backlink Building - Opinions Matter

dylan_bell•21d ago

Used to blast 40 guest posts a month through a broker, now I pitch 3 sites a week by hand

Back around 2022 I was paying a broker $1,800 a month for 40 guest posts and feeling like a genius. Traffic was flat for 8 months and I could not figure out why until a friend who does SEO for a law firm in Austin pulled up 12 of those sites and showed me every one was a recycled crypto blog with a spam score of 60. The next Monday I cancelled it and started doing it myself, which meant reading every target site, finding a real article I liked, and emailing the writer with a specific idea instead of a template. My reply rate dropped to maybe 9 percent at the start, so I upped the volume of outreach and cut the number of posts from 40 down to 3 or 4 a week. Six months later I had 22 links from actual niche sites, and one of them still sends me 400 visits a month on its own. The work is boring and slow and some weeks I get nothing back, but at least I know who is linking to me. Curious what your outreach reply rate looks like, because mine is still under 15 percent and I want to know if that is just normal.

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laura18920d ago

some weeks I get nothing back" hits hard because that was the part I never believed until I lived it. I used to think reply rate was the whole game, like if I just found the magic template I'd hit 30 or 40 percent and be set. Then I did what you did and read the actual sites, and my rate went up but it also got way slower, and I realized the rate on its own means nothing because a 9 percent rate on real niche sites beats a 40 percent rate on crypto blogs that pass nothing. So yes, under 15 percent is normal, most people I talk to land somewhere between 5 and 15, and the writers who reply are often the ones who actually care about their site. The bigger win for me was cutting volume and tracking who replied at all, since the same people tended to say yes again later. Do you keep a list of the writers who said no but were nice about it? That list has been better for me than any cold pitch.