Instead of giving you 50 options that we would never use for linkbuilding, we’re going to show you HOW to start a campaign, from scratch, so you can start building links ASAP.
You don’t need to spend a ton of money on link building software, and you can start a good linkbuilding campaign for around $150.
Are you ready to start building links?
Let’s get started!
Best Link Building Software to Actually Build Links
1. Ahrefs.com ($99 per month)
Ahrefs by FAR has the best backlink data on the web. If you want to build links, you must use Ahrefs.
Any linkbuilder that isn’t utilizing Ahrefs is going to be left in the dust, and that’s simply how it is.
Ahrefs lets you dig into your competition’s backlink profile and reverse engineer what backlinks they have.
What they have over Semrush.com is that they are much more active when it comes to crawling the web with their spider. Ahrefs’ robot crawler is ranked 4th for the most number of requests, right under Bing and Google.
Ahrefs recently raised their prices, and now there is a credit system that you can quickly run through if you don’t know what you’re doing.
While their pricing is at $99 per month, you’ll have to pay around $35 more to add another 500 credits, which for a heavy linkbuilder is not much.
It’s a good start at $99 per month, but you’ll be limited and won’t be able to utilize the “Linked Domains” functions which is imperative if you want to reverse engineer paid backlinks from sites that sell backlinks.
A quick way to prospect 1000s of hits is to go to the “Organic Competitors” function in Ahrefs and download all of their Referring Domain reports, and it’s a good idea to filter it for 1000+ traffic, 20DR-80DR and “dofollow” links.
Once that’s done, you can compile them with Merge-csv.com.
Now the hard part, as you’ll have a list of thousands of non-relevant websites to sort through. But that’s what’s required when doing linkbuilding, a lot of manual work to sort through lots of data.
You can outsource this easily, and can teach your assistant or freelancer how to identify a good prospect VS a bad one.
2. Google Workspace + Domain $6 + $12
While you don’t NEED Google Workspace or a domain to send emails from, you’ll look far more professional when doing outreach.
I do not recommend sending emails from your website’s domain unless you’re doing targetted outreach. This is because you can flag your domain for spam, and it can take a while to get it back to a non-spammy status.
We send emails from our agency domain, zenbacklinks.com, but if I were to start another domain, I would name it something like “Zenbacklinksoutreach.com” and put a link back to the main site in our email signature.
It’s $6 per user when billed yearly and it’s well worth it. You can also add in more emails and send under as many accounts as you’d like.
We prefer to limit it to 3 emails per domain, as it’s less likely you’ll be flagged for spam.
You will also need to properly set up SPIF, DKIM and DMARC, which you can find instructions here to do so.
3. Google Sheets (free)
When you have your prospecting sheet ready from the merged CSV from ahrefs.com, it will come out looking a bit like this:
While it’s not PERFECT, you can utilize Google Sheets to start doing basic tasks like filtering out websites that have a certain keyword or even hire someone to create a script to filter out domains that don’t have the correct top level domain.
So for instance, you may be building domains for a website located in the USA, and you can filter out any sites that don’t have .com, .co.uk, .org, .net and .edu TLDs.
Google Sheets is free, but it is limited. If you compile 100 referring domain sheets from Ahrefs, you won’t be able to open it up in Google Sheets.
You can buy Excel for $160 or just pay $6.99 a month on the Microsoft 365 plan.
4. Hunter.io (free)
Hunter.io is an email finding tool BUT they also offer a free campaign feature which is good enough to start out with for any linkbuilder in training.
Once you’ve got your list of potential prospects, you don’t want to waste a lot of time manually searching for all the emails. You can do it to start, but once you’re needing to do it 100 or even 1000+ times, it doesn’t make sense to even outsource this type of work.
Hunter.io starts at $49 per month for 500 email credits or you can go for the $149 plan per month which gives you 5000 email credits. They also verify the emails for you as well, which is important. You don’t want to send unverified emails in bulk, as they can bounce, and the more bounces that come back the more likely it is you’ll be flagged for spam.
Once you have your Google Workspace and sending domain set up, you’ll need to connect it with your Hunter.io account which you can do here. Free accounts are limited to one email address, but on the $149 plan you can add up to 10.
You will want to customize your outreach emails as well, as even adding in the first name and company name can make it seem like you’re sending personalized emails. Hunter.io makes it easy and saves a bunch of time.
Hunter.io is great when starting out, but other tools like Respona, Mailshake and Pitchbox also allow for much more customization which can be helpful if you’re sending out personalized email at scale.
To be honest though, we’ve landed 1000s of links using this linkbuilding software stack, and don’t see any need to pay for other tools.
Final Thoughts
Building links is a daunting task at first, but after a while, it’ll be second nature.
You will land in spam eventually, you will have your process break, but you will figure it out as you go.
It’s the same with anything in life, the best experience comes from doing the task rather than reading about it online.
With that being said, it’s time to build some links!
