Rebuilding a Link-Building Operation on Monday.com
A digital PR and SEO agency ran its link-building work for a dozen gambling and sports media clients out of monthly spreadsheets, one per client, one per month. Nobody could say how many links were live, who had earned the credit, or how long a placement took. This is how that became four connected Monday.com boards, a leadership dashboard, and six months of history imported in one go.
The Challenge: A dozen clients, a dozen spreadsheets, no single answer
The agency's link-building team places content on publisher sites for gambling and sports media clients. Each client had a monthly worksheet. Each worksheet had its own column names, its own status values and its own idea of what "live" meant. Outreachers, content writers and client leads all worked from the same sheets, and the sheets were where the work went to get lost.
The questions leadership wanted answered were simple. How many links are live this month, by client? Who found the site and who earned the credit? How long does a placement take from first contact to live link? Which publisher sites have we already used, and which are we paying to re-find? None of them could be answered without someone spending an afternoon in Excel, and the answer was different depending on who did it.
Two things made the build harder than a standard board setup. Outreach and content are different jobs done by different people, but the same item passes between them and back, so a single board would either bury the writers in outreach noise or lose the item at the handover. And six months of history sat in spreadsheets with inconsistent headers, duplicated domains and half a dozen ways of spelling the same client, and it needed to come across intact or the reporting would start from zero.
What Was Built: Boards that follow the work, and a credit system that ends the arguments
Four connected boards. An Outreach board where every placement lives, a Content board that only shows items that need writing, a Client Database and a Site Database. Outreach and Content are linked by status: when a placement is set to Content Needed it appears on the writers' board, and when the writer marks it Ready to Send it returns to Outreach with the content attached. The Site Database mirrors domain metrics into every placement, so nobody types a DR figure twice.
Outreacher credit. Two columns, Allocation and Outreacher, track who was given the target and who got the link live. An automation copies Allocation to Outreacher if it is blank when the link goes live, so the right person gets the credit and the notification, and the monthly arguments about attribution stopped.
Timers that start when work starts. Time to Find and Project Total Time timers start when an item moves into Ongoing, not when it is created, so bulk uploads do not skew the averages. Average time per stage per team member sits on the leadership dashboard.
Views per role. Trackers by stage, by client and by ongoing for content leads; archive, by-status and by-client views for outreach; weekly stats boards for the monthly review; a leadership dashboard across all of it.
Six months of history, cleaned and imported. Seven source sheets became three upload-ready files. Records were deduplicated on client, month and domain, with the most recent sheet taking precedence, then split into This Month Live, Ongoing and Archive groups. 567 publisher sites were classified as Placed or Pool from the outreach history. Status values were mapped to one vocabulary, including a new archived status for placements a publisher approved but content was never sent for, so the history did not lie by omission.
Duplicate guard for bulk site uploads. A spreadsheet-based check that takes the site database export and a proposed import and flags duplicates before they reach Monday.
Delivered in phases with a fixed price, a training week for the team, and written documentation of every automation, including the ones nobody will remember exist in a year.
The result is that the monthly questions now have one answer, and it is the same answer whoever asks.
950+ historical records migrated from seven spreadsheets into three boards, deduplicated, with six months of live-link history intact.
567 publisher sites in a single database, classified by whether the agency has placed on them before, so re-use and re-finding are visible.
Four connected boards replacing a spreadsheet per client per month, with outreacher credit, stage timers and a leadership dashboard that reads from live data.
The agency now runs its link-building operation, and its client reporting, from Monday.com rather than from whoever last had the spreadsheet open, with a small monthly arrangement in place to keep the boards honest as the team and client list change.
The client is anonymised. Figures are counts from the migration itself rather than estimates.