This is the fourth interview in the ‘SEO interviews’ series for the Ahrefs blog. Today we’ll talk to Venchito Tampon, who has made a name for himself very quickly in the international SEO scene from being a back-end SEO ninja working for another company just a year or so back. Let’s get to know about the insights Venchito is going to share.

Q: Hello, Venchito. Welcome to the Ahrefs Blog! Can you please give a short introduction of yourself at first?

I’m Venchito Tampon, the sole author of Digital Philippines. I run my own link building agency, LinkCore Media, where I became its Marketing Director. We started the operations last year (December) and so far, we’re already handling 20 link building campaigns from a variety of industries including legal, credit card, pest control and home improvement niches.

Q: So, you’re running a link building agency that’s generating some nice revenue. What has been the experience so far?

It was one of the best moments that happened in my career since I was able to learn a lot from the agency’s experience, which includes the following:

• Process documentation
• Lead generation
• Agency’s operations

Here are some of my learnings from each of the agency’s phases mentioned above:

Process documentation

This is the main core of every business besides sales and it helps our agency a lot in scaling each activity, task and person working on each link development campaign. Without processes, it is nearly impossible to scale one’s business.

For process documentation, we only use Google Docs (Word and Spreadsheet) to put up workflows for each phase (link prospecting, qualification, content creation and outreach). This enables us to see patterns of tasks that we can easily change or add up another tasks (if needed) to improve the overall campaign.

Lead generation

Generating leads for the agency is one of the crucial yet exciting aspects in one’s business given that you need to qualify each lead based on the standards of your agency in order to gain long-term benefits as a business owner.

Main qualifiers that I use in order to filter out unfit potential clients for my agency:

• Client’s resources (site’s existing contents, available team members whom we can partner with, estimated budget for the campaign, etc..)
• Client’s capability of referring more clients to our agency
• Status of the client (big or small brand) – which will be a potential add-on to our clients portfolio

With these filters, we are able to find partners that will not only give us revenue but will also help us grow our company.

Agency’s operations

Operations of a business involve processes and people. For a service provider agency, people are our best asset.

The more we’re able to motivate our staff members to do their best in their works as well as help them achieve their personal and career goals through our weekly trainings and daily task monitoring, the likelihood of growing the company every single month (in terms of sales and client acquisition) is higher.

Q: Can you list a few of your agency’s best achievements for clients from a results perspective?

Partnering with one of the well-known brands in the ecommerce and furniture industries is one of our top achievements as an agency. Brands like Shopify and Efurniture Mart are our current clients today.

For a two-month old agency, I guess our big achievement is being able to handle 20 link building campaigns.  I believe that in the next few months, we’ll be able to target more SMBs and big brands that’re willing to outsource their link building works to us and achieve greater goals for their companies.

Q: What are the link building strategies that are still effective in 2015?

A few link building tactics that our agency is focusing on are:

• Guest blogging – pitching to high quality industry-related blogs and asking if you can become their regular content contributors to acquire recurring backlinks every month, since you’ll be submitting at least one article for each of those blogs in a monthly basis.
• Broken link building – sending outreach emails to webmasters, letting them know about broken links seen in their resource pages and asking if they’d be interested in replacing those defunct links with links to your client’s content and to other related resources from non-competitor sites.
• Linker outreach – reaching out to potential linkers in the industry that have history of linking to similar pages of your client’s competitors (relevancy is the top element in this approach).

There are other link building methods that you can apply to your campaign, but those aforementioned link techniques are enough to kick off your link building strategy now.

Q: As a link building consultant, what are the common questions you received from your potential clients?

The following are the top questions in emails that I received from potential clients (leads) almost every single day:

• What is the cost of your link building services?
• Do you have any discounts for SEO agencies willing to outsource their link building work to your company?
• What specific link methods are you using for your clients?
• Is there any chance that we can approve first your list of link prospects before you proceed to outreach?
• What kind of reports are you providing to your clients?

Answers to these questions vary depending on how well we understand the business of the client, how deep is our relationship with the brand (i.e. if they are referred by our current client, then there might be some consideration in terms of project costs) and lastly, they will be based on how competitive the industry of the target client.

Q: What are the link building services that you provide to your clients and how different they are from other link development companies?

Basically, we have customized link building packages for our clients depending on how many websites they’re handling and what specific resources they have (budget, team members whom we can partner with, etc..).

Our services include the following activities:

• Link assessment
• Content promotion (outreach)
• Monthly reporting

This is different from other link building agencies since most of the time, other companies based their prices on the number of hours they’ve spent getting links rather than on how many links they have acquired for the client (or simply relying on the monthly budget of the client).

To give you an example of a company service page, you can check out our link building services page.

Q: As a co-founder of a link building firm, how do you scale link building campaigns?

Scaling link building campaigns involve people and processes.

These two elements are very important in making sure that there is a steady growth in business in terms of handling multiple clients, retaining them for the long run (it could be 5 years or more depending on the quality of the service) and attracting potential clients or leads through referrals and branding.

People are the best asset.

For a service provider company, it is imperative to conduct weekly trainings where team members can learn from tutorials, mentoring and even simply reading the top blog posts of the week (go to Inbound.org for this).

The more skilled our workers are, the likelihood of handling more clients over time is higher.

Documenting processes, which are mostly repetitive tasks helps our agency to save labor costs and time, since there will be no need to personally train a new team member when he/she comes on board. We can simply refer the person to documents that will introduce him/her to our system and if he/she has questions, then we can add them up to our database and include answers to our documents (we constantly update our process documents).

Q: Could you give us some link building secrets that you’ve never shared elsewhere?

I don’t have any secrets at all.

But I guess the one thing that I’ve never shared to people is how I work on a daily basis.

Productivity is very important especially in link building since you need to see which tasks are important and urgent in order not to waste time every single hour.

The Pareto Principle (80/20), which is basically focusing on the less volume of activities/tasks (20%) that will give you 80% results, certainly keeps my daily work productive.

Q: Where do you see your company and yourself in the next five years or so?

In the next five years, I believe that we will grow our company to the team size like that of SEER Interactive. Besides the number of team members, SEER has the quality of services that keeps them alive for almost ten years now.

Also, part of our goal is to retain our clients (at least 90% of them) until the next several years. Client retention is a big issue for us and it is one of our main priorities this year.

Personally, I’ll be active in speaking for digital marketing and entrepreneurship seminars in the local and international areas. I’m also planning to start my own startup and inspirational blog and become a recognized Filipino motivational speaker here in the Philippines.

So, there it is. Thanks a lot, Venchito for taking the time to answer these questions.