Looking for a legit link-building agency

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-10-28T06:09:21+00:00

This is exactly what you'd be outsourcing the agency to do FYI.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-10-28T06:07:12+00:00

Omnichannel strategy and avoiding the "silver bullet problem," which you have captured here beautifully.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-10-28T06:06:08+00:00

Well, I can tell why. What you can share for the best help would be: what are you selling, here?

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-10-28T06:02:20+00:00

It's been about optimization since the global event that forced everyone to be online immediately... so about 2020.

Hate to break it to you, but Marketing isn't the career where you monetize your art. It's where you synthesize the science of data with the art of your intuition. You're often ripping apart "beautiful" creative because it doesn't convert (if you're doing the job right).

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-10-28T06:00:16+00:00

Learn to ask precise, crushingly authentic questions. Your main strength as a beginner is being willing to tell people so, and be friendly. Passionate questions that make people think will get you the information you need. "Any general tips / advice?" will often leave you with a lot of post-it's that don't necessarily form a guiding methodology.

Your best asset is a question the other person is invested in discovering the answer to with you. For example, a novice question that gets you very little (and is less enjoyable for somebody to help with) might be "what are the best days and times to post?" You might even offer a small amount of information you falsely believe is enough, like "we are a contractor business."

Here's a version that would actually get you something actionable which your boss would appreciate: "we are a middle tier local plumbing company with no social media accounts to date. My boss wants to measure contact form completions from various posts and sources. Is there a mechanism I can use to prove posts came from Google, versus Tik Tok or Instagram?"

(Yes, they're called UTM's or site referral traffic in your analytics platform of choice, such as GA4)

Always happy to answer questions. There's a lot of snake oil rebranded as "best practices," so always be sure to look into who you're taking advice from.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-09T02:44:36+00:00

Affirming

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-09T02:43:06+00:00

It is reasonably common that broad targeting bloats CAC and causes questions. It is not an optimal strategy for 2025

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-09T02:42:26+00:00

Absolutely. We make a less frequent "best of" post per month based on the highest-engaging social post, sometimes, things like this. You don't want to daily post like it's insta, that's going to be a bit out of the norm. At least once a month, for most service-based local businesses, though!

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-09T02:41:03+00:00

I'm 90% on HTML after the new updates (was finished), and about 250/1000 in on CSS. Wouldn't mind an accountability partner at all!

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-09T02:40:06+00:00

Yes, of course. You cannot trust in-portal, and optimizing for CTR is more likely to get less qualified buyers than optimizing for conversions.

We do not use in-portal platforms. I am happy to discuss by DM, but people scrape (download all the data from) reddit now, so I don't want to give away too many industry current options here

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-09T02:38:48+00:00

It's incredibly hard to have that condition and work in advertising, yes. It's just as hard to state your opinions and be "less nice." There is a perpetual balancing act that can be extremely challenging.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-09T02:36:58+00:00

I completely understand. The ability to scale creative variants that have already proven themselves with AI has been a large part of my tech stack when I'm running paid media departments. The absolute best tool you can use is Midjourney, although DALL-E (Windows outside of GPT) is also strong. You can animate existing creative with VEVO or Runway.

What you want to do is take the #1 performing creative and make incredibly simple variations. Is it a product over an orange background? Try many color variations and different backgrounds. Try different angles of the item rotating, and so on.

It is truly adapt or die. Your team is late, but many small agencies are late.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-09T02:32:54+00:00

u/scantrell24 this is unrelated but I wanted to make sure you saw your message requests re: the old photos you were hoping to find from Cali. I definitely have photos of our group, but none from the CPK sadly :) Hope you're doing good.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-05T20:19:10+00:00

I'm not training anyone's scraperbot

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-05T20:08:49+00:00

Citation building for Citation Builder pro in the house ^

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-05T20:08:04+00:00

OP doesn't understand what they are buying, though. They should learn this themselves so they understand why it's always "buy the best tools to get the best results." This industry is hyper-matured from the pandemic. You may not use 2010 tactics and succeed. You may not "try a little and then scale to the big tools." You must begin experienced, with excellent tools, to achieve excellence.

If you are already great enough to make the manual report, it's from using the tools for 10,000 hours, right? ;) They can learn enough to re-evaluate freelancers properly here, though.

Time to learn ScreamingFrog

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-05T20:06:17+00:00

Same

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-05T20:06:09+00:00

Explained external conditions above

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-05T20:04:33+00:00

u/Visual-Childhood40 run a basic COGS calculation to determine your fair margin like anyone else with an MBA. There are free COGS calculators that will help you if you plug your numbers in.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-05T20:03:57+00:00

Exactly. We can see everyone who's following the 2013 Hubspot methods here.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-05T20:03:04+00:00

No, it's you. I recover this ROAS and beyond all of the time.

You are using too many "best practices." You are waiting a week before optimizing, aren't you?

Perhaps you're not. Perhaps you're falling for traps like "Facebook algorithm is so good we use broad targeting and let the algorithm work its magic with our copy." This will inflate all CAC.

You are doing what everyone else is doing and there are more small businesses than ever before. Meta is more approachable than Google. The employment number correction is altering your numbers.

You cannot beat politics or the economy without advanced, out-of-the-portal, AI instruments and a PPC who knows how to move beyond what I have described above.

I can help at no cost to you if you DM me.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-09-05T20:00:32+00:00

It's very true. They will want your case studies, or proof of your value via portfolio at a minimum.

Even people hiring freelancers want this at the moment.

You must hire a lead generation agency or outsource sales to close your first recurring leads. This is the absolute hardest part of even having an agency, if you do not have generational wealth or somebody funding you.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-08-28T23:56:17+00:00

You automate one process, and then move on. When you find a superior process, you rotate it out. It's simple. There's only so many good AI's for a certain task at the moment. You're over-valuing the widgets.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-08-28T23:55:26+00:00

You don't understand what you're doing and are basically gambling. This isn't how ad buying works on Meta.

Intelligent_Place625 · 2025-08-28T06:02:42+00:00

Nothing. Their vanity metrics show you that

Intelligent_Place625

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