The Missing Piece of Your SEO Strategy: Link Building with Josh Elkin of Linkflow
Key Takeaways
- Josh dropped everything except link building about two and a half years before this episode, after noticing every client struggled to build links repeatedly and reading Built to Sell.
- Link building without an SEO strategy underdelivers, so Linkflow added a three-person SEO team to pick the right pages and content.
- He found his partner Ben through a post in a Facebook agency owner group, then ran a six-month salaried 'dating phase' before talking equity.
- A paid strategic roadmap replaced custom retainer pitches. Clients value it on its own, 90% go on to a retainer, and a salesperson can sell it.
- Health issues forced Josh off sales calls. A new salesperson was closing roadmap deals within a few weeks.
- A Friday JotForm survey (proud of, frustrated by, how leadership could do better, one crazy idea) surfaces problems before they fester.
Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode (after a sponsor read for Oribi) with Josh Elkin, founder of Linkflow, a white-hat link building agency. Josh had listened to the show for about six years and had worked with ZenPilot for close to a year. They covered the niche, his partner Ben, the paid roadmap, agency partnerships, and what Josh wishes he’d done sooner.
Every client had the same problem: building links repeatedly
Josh started like most agency owners, doing a bit of everything: content marketing, paid ads, email. One problem kept showing up.
There was one problem that clients consistently kept having, and that was the ability to build backlinks repeatedly… There’s this one consistent challenge for companies, and it seems that it’s something that no one really knows how to do well. And they know they need to do it.
Built to Sell, which he’d just read, pushed him to pick one service and do it well, and about two and a half years before this recording he shed everything else. By the episode Linkflow was 12 people, including a three-person SEO team that exists because of an early lesson: clients without a real SEO strategy got the same quality links and worse results.
He found his business partner with a Facebook post
Gray asked how Ben came in. Josh had tried partnering with five different people over the years, and none of it stuck. Then, during COVID, he wrote down what he actually wanted.
There was three things. One of them was I wanted a dog, one of them was I wanted a better workstation from home, and one of them was I wanted a business partner… I put an ad in a marketing agency owner group on Facebook, of all places, and basically said, look, I’ve grown this agency from zero up to, I think at that point it was like 40 grand a month MRR. I’m looking at 5x that, and kind of tired of doing it alone.
Ben was the first to respond. The first six months were a trial with Ben on a fixed salary, what Josh called the dating phase before getting engaged; equity came after. Josh said the partnership put energy and joy back into his day. A year and a half earlier he’d been unhappy and unsure he wanted to keep going, even at $40k a month.
A paid roadmap replaced custom link pitches, and 90% go on to a retainer
One of the first things ZenPilot and Linkflow worked on together was the front end of the sale. Josh had been pitching 10-link-a-month retainers, and no two sales calls looked the same. ZenPilot pushed an entry-level strategic roadmap instead. Josh was skeptical anyone would pay for a strategy project with no links in it. Ben was all for it, and they started selling it that week.
Now we’re at a spot where clients love that piece. They find a lot of value in just that, and on top of that, 90% of them go on to do a retainer with us… One, it’s allowed us to price our services higher, I think, because we come in with better positioning at the front end. Two, it’s just an easier product to sell… This allowed us to hire a salesperson who could then sell that roadmap.
Agencies can order links a la carte, with no monthly minimum
Gray asked how Linkflow works with other agencies. White label had been on, then off: the full roadmap didn’t fit agencies that already had an SEO strategy and just wanted links for known keywords and pages. The replacement is a la carte: a form (a self-serve portal was in the works) with the client, target pages, anchor text, and quantity. Linkflow still vets publications the same way; it just stays out of the strategy, so the price is lower.
It’s kind of a no contract, no monthly commitment. We’re not even doing a monthly minimum. It’s just take as many as you want this month. If you want to stop that next month, that’s fine.
For agencies that don’t touch SEO, like PPC or Facebook ads shops, there’s a referral program: a flat $5,000 for any referral that becomes a client.
What he wishes he’d done sooner
Gray closed by asking for the lessons of the last couple of years. Josh had five ready. The first was forced on him.
As a founder, try to take yourself out of the day to day operations as soon as you can… About six months ago I had some health issues and I could no longer take all the sales calls myself… We did bring in a salesperson. It was just much easier to train that salesperson than I expected it would be, and they were closing deals within a few weeks… So I guess I overestimated how valuable I was in the sales process, which is a bit of an ego thing for sure.
Second was the foot-in-the-door offer. Third was Ben’s idea.
We do an employee feedback survey every Friday… What’s one thing that you’re proud of this week? What’s one thing that frustrated you this week? What’s one way that leadership could do better? What’s a crazy idea you have for improving the business that might be a little out there?… We get so many ideas from reading those JotForms, and Ben and I go through them every Monday, that it’s been invaluable for the business.
That week, the form surfaced someone who felt unheard in a meeting, and they got on a call before it festered. Fourth was ClickUp: new client setups now deploy automatically. Fifth, raise your prices. Josh had heard the advice for years and ignored it; when they did it, signups didn’t change and the clients got better.