The $95,000 Linking Mistake

We own and manage a series of sports websites. From a four year period, we had a small team of linkers who worked on these sites daily—adding links, reaching out to other site owners, and engaging with sports fans on social media, forums, and other sports sites. After four years of steady link building, we directed our focus away from sports and stopped our active linking and outreach efforts. In retrospect, this decision—made 20 months ago—was a huge financial mistake. In the first four months using link builders, we generated $14,780 in revenue from our primary sports site. In the immediate four months after we stopped linking, our revenue dropped to $8,964. We suffered a 39% drop in revenue in just four months. Because this was our busiest time of the year, the full economic impact was partially hidden. Over the 20 months since we’ve stopped our outreach and linking program, our sports website has generated $28,633 in revenue. In the 20 months before we stopped linking, our site generated $123,757 in revenue. By stopping our outreach and linking program, we lost $95,124 in revenue! That is almost $5,000 a month! What Is the Correlation Between Linking and Revenue?