When it comes right down to it, link building works in the very essence of marketing itself; not only is link building an incredible way to acquire visibility of your website on authoritative, relevant websites, but it also adds cement in the foundation built upon the relationship that exists between businesses online.

That makes link building an essential cog in the business marketing machine, and in the coming year, you as a marketer must go back to their roots and master the of going about building great links to your website.  Consider this 5-step strategy proposed by Alison Groves of Raven Internet Marketing Tools:

Step 1: Research

What kind of websites do you want to discover?

To make sure they’re high quality, look for sites that are:

• Highly authoritative
• Seen as trustworthy
• Sites you want to be associated with
• Popular with competitors

Step 2: Outreach

Use your research to cultivate a list of high quality websites with whom to start building relationships.

• Connect with website owners via social media
• Organize your outreach:
• Manage the outreach:
• Share the load

Step 3: Organize

What do I need to know about the potential link and relationship I’m working on?

• Date of first outreach
• Date of follow up: You never want to be too forward or needy.
• Type of link requested or acquired: Are you writing a guest post? Did you comment on a blog? Did the link happen organically?
• Website domain: Yeah, you might need that one.
• Website owner’s contact info: Can’t build a relationship if you can’t get in touch with them.
• Conversation notes: If you’re talking to a ton of people, keeping detailed notes on the conversations you’re having will save you from a world of embarrassment later. Trust me.

Step 4: Follow up

Once you’ve done your research, performed your outreach, organized all the data, hopefully you will have heard back from some site owners and will be well on your way to building great relationships with them.

If so, make sure you are constantly maintaining your information. Every conversation you have, every step of the link building process (requesting links, to active links to even inactive links). The more information you have, the more you need to organize and maintain it.

Step 5: Report

One of the biggest struggles marketers have is proving our worth to our boss or client.

While the end game of traffic and conversions is somewhat apparent, how did we get there?

Acquiring mentions and the relationships that come along with that take time, and can be hard to quantify that time to those paying the bills.