Link Campaign Management With a Published Reject List

About two thirds of the domains that reach a campaign in our categories fail vetting before anyone writes an email. Publishing that rejection rate at the outset is the point. This engagement is the management layer over a link programme, who is worth approaching, what is offered, what is refused, and whether the placements that landed moved anything. It is not a supply contract and there is no inventory behind it. Vetting, and what fails it: A named masthead with an editor who has rejected something. Search traffic from more than one country's results rather than a single-market spike. An outbound profile that does not read as an inventory list. No public price for sponsored placement and no listing on the marketplaces we monitor. Existing rankings for something adjacent to your topic, which is the only reliable evidence that the audience overlaps at all. Sites that fail go onto a reject list with the reason recorded and that list is shared with you, so nobody pitches them again next quarter after the account team changes. Target selection: We build from the referring domains of the three or four sites actually outranking you on the cluster in question, not from the whole competitive set and not from a sort by domain rating. Each target gets a stated reason it should care: a dataset, a practitioner who can comment on something specific, a tool, an event, or a correction to something they have already published. Targets with no such reason are dropped rather than pitched weakly. Running the campaign: Sequencing, follow-ups, and the judgement calls that arrive mid-campaign. Whether to accept a nofollow. Whether an unlinked mention is worth converting. Whether a publication that asks for payment can still be worked with on an editorial basis. We make those calls and record the reasoning so the next campaign inherits it. Every relationship where money moves is documented and carries a sponsored attribute. That is not a point we negotiate, and we say so before the contract rather than during it. Measurement: Referring domains are an input, not a result. We report on the URL cluster the campaign pointed at: its rankings for target queries against domains gained, on a ninety-day lag window. The report names the placements that did nothing. In most campaigns a minority of links carry the movement, and knowing which minority changes the next quarter's targeting more than any volume figure. Coordination: Where you already run press work or an authorship programme, we manage the overlap so two suppliers are not pitching the same health desk in the same week. This is administrative and unglamorous and it is a large share of what goes wrong in programmes run by more than one agency. What we refuse: Per-link pricing. Guarantees of any metric, because nobody controls a third party's editorial decision and a guarantee is only possible where the placement was bought outright. Private blog networks, link exchanges and reciprocal arrangements. The circulating inventory sold by domain-rating band. We also decline campaigns for regulated products where the landing page has not yet cleared your own review, because a placement pointing at a page that gets pulled in week three burns the relationship as well as the budget. Who this is not for: Anyone who measures this work in links per month. Sites in their first year with nothing published worth citing, where there is no reason for a link to exist yet and we will say that rather than sell a campaign anyway. Teams who want an outreach department staffed rather than a programme run and held to account. We work in Polish and English, which is the difference between pitching a Warsaw health or finance desk in their own language and sending them a translated template they will recognise as one.