Link programme management for in-house growth teams

Most brands at this stage are paying three vendors who are pitching the same two journalists in the same week, and nobody inside the company knows it is happening. This engagement is one person owning the link function end to end, sitting between your growth team, your comms people, your PR agency and your developers, on a fee that does not move with how many links appear that month. Paying per link is what creates the incentive to buy them. What I take over: The plan, the story pipeline, the outreach itself or the supervision of whoever does it, the coverage record, and the answer when your CFO asks what the last quarter bought. One story owner per campaign, agreed in writing, so your agency and I are not both emailing Drapers on a Tuesday. A shared coverage sheet that your team can read without asking me for a status update. The calendar drives it: Planning is pegged to your merchandising and operations calendar rather than to a content schedule. Drops, collaborations, the sustainability report, Black Week, and the January returns peak, which in this category is the strongest press window of the year and almost every brand sleeps through it because the team is busy processing the returns. Stories are committed a quarter ahead and killed early when the data behind them stops holding. The refusal log: Every month you get a written list of what was turned down and why: the placement broker who emailed your marketing coordinator, the paid roundup, the reciprocal link offer from a sister brand in the group, the agency that included a link count in its proposal. The risk in this work is rarely what you decide to buy. It is what somebody three desks away buys without knowing it matters. Cleaning up what came before: An early pass over the existing profile for placements bought by a previous vendor, with a per-link view on whether to remove, leave or let it decay. Where a contract guarantees link volume, my recommendation is to end it, and I will write that email for you. This part is uncomfortable and it is the reason some brands do not hire me. How you will know it works: Referring domains that also send sessions, reported monthly. The share of new links coming from publications with a masthead and a named editor, which should climb. Commercial head terms at 90 and 180 days. And the count of stories that originated inside your business rather than from me, which should rise every quarter; if it does not, you are renting a function you should be growing. Not this: I do not run your paid media, your affiliate programme or your influencer seeding. If those links are not marked sponsored or nofollow, I will tell you once, in writing, and it becomes your legal team's problem rather than mine. I do not write your blog. I do not manage a content calendar. I do not produce slide decks; the monthly review is 60 minutes with the person accountable for growth, and the record lives in the coverage sheet. Who this is not for: Companies without an internal owner. I work alongside somebody, never instead of everybody. Companies where the link count is already promised to a board. Companies who want this at agency scale across twelve brands; I take a small number of engagements a year and one of them is either yours or it is not. And any company that expects month one to produce links: the first four weeks are audit, vendor review and story pipeline, and nothing lands in them.