Worked example
A $500 link building budget for a SaaS with no revenue yet, as a worked example
The product, the numbers and the results below are made up. Only the price range and the process come from how the marketplace works.
Meet an imaginary founder with a two-month-old invoicing tool for freelance translators. No such company exists. We invented the traffic, the dates and the spend to show how the reasoning goes.
The starting position
Our imaginary founder has a home page, a pricing page and one comparison page against a bigger invoicing tool. Search Console shows 400 impressions a week on the comparison page and 12 clicks. Paying customers: none yet.
The budget is $500, to be spent over three months, with no single order above $60. A rule like that stops one tempting row from eating the plan.
Setting the cap before the first row
Before the first row goes in the basket, the founder writes one cap for the whole plan and one for each order. Those two numbers protect the budget more than any clever row selection does.
The cap is a decision, not a forecast. You do not need to predict results to set it. You only need to decide how much runway the experiment may use. Write that number down.
Why a per-order limit helps
Without one, a single tempting row can absorb most of the plan. It happens fast. Picture a founder who spots a donor at $200 with strong metrics. Without a per-order cap, that row wins by default, even though the plan was designed to learn across several pages.
The $60 ceiling in this example is a deliberate choice. It keeps the first batch small enough that a disappointing result costs little.
What counts against the cap
Only paid placements count here, not the hours spent on research. Hours are real money. Still, write the hours down somewhere else. A plan that looks cheap on paper can hide a week of evenings.
Taxes, fees from the payment side and any other charges are not part of this example. Check them against your own invoice before you trust the total.
The reserve nobody spends
The part of the plan you leave alone protects you the most. Leave it alone. In the invented split, the founder keeps money back for a second look rather than a second order. That reserve lets you respond to results instead of reacting to them.
Unspent money is not a failure of the plan. It is the plan working as designed.
Who sets the cap, and when
The founder sets the cap while still calm, ideally before opening the list at all. Set it early. Writing the number down first means a good-looking donor cannot move it later. A cap set in the middle of a browsing session is usually a cap that moves.
If someone else signs off on the money, agree the cap with them before the first order goes in.
How the $500 could be split
| Month | Action | Spend | What gets recorded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Month 1, week 1 | Fix the comparison page; submit to free directories | $0 | Date of each listing and its link attribute |
| Month 1, week 4 | Three placements to the comparison page, mid-priced niche rows | $90 | Donor, price, live date |
| Month 2 | Review Search Console; add two more only if impressions moved | $0 to $100 | Impressions, clicks, sign-ups per week |
| Month 3 | Two placements to the pricing page or a second comparison page | $100 to $150 | Same columns, new URL |
| Reserve | Left unspent unless a result justifies it | $160 to $310 | A written reason before spending |
What the example teaches
Most of the money stays unspent
The plan is built to stop early. If nothing moves after the first batch, the cheap thing to learn is that the page, not the number of links, needs work.
- Spend in small batches
- Review before every new batch
- Keep a reserve on purpose
What the founder reads in Search Console (hypothetical)
After six weeks the imaginary comparison page shows 900 impressions a week instead of 400, and 30 clicks. That would be encouraging, not proof. A seasonal bump, a new blog post or plain luck could produce the same chart.
Control pages help. So the founder compares against a page with no new links. If the control page also rose, the links get less credit. If only the linked page rose, they get some, though never all of it. Keep the claim modest in both cases.
The numbers here are made up. The habit of keeping a control page is real advice, and it costs nothing.
And if the founder had $100 instead
Then one batch of two or three rows to the comparison page, nothing else. Pair it with the free listings from the directory guide and the checks in the launch checklist.
And if it were $1,000? The same shape holds. Wider spread across more URLs, still reviewed batch by batch, and the price ranges help you avoid putting the whole sum on one row.
When to stop a batch early, and when to wait
A batch can go wrong in two ways. It can stall, or it can move so slowly that you cannot tell whether it moved at all. Both are real. Each one needs a different response.
Decide the stop rule before the first placement goes live. A rule written after a bad week is usually a rule for that week.
Signs the test is not moving
If impressions show no change after the review window, and the donor's page is clearly live, stop adding rows to that URL. Look at the page first, not the donor.
The usual culprit is the page itself, such as a thin answer or a vague title. Fix that before another order goes into the basket.
Signs it moves, but slowly
Slow movement is harder to read. Impressions can rise a little while clicks stay flat, which suggests the page is being seen but not chosen. That is a copy problem more often than a link problem.
Wait for one more window before you change the spend. Two windows of data beat one lucky week.
Why a flat chart still teaches you
A flat line after a placement is information, not silence. It tells you that one link on one page was not enough, at least for this window, so the next batch should test something different.
Write the result down the same day you read it, while you still remember what you expected.
When to stop the whole plan
Stopping the whole plan is a bigger decision than pausing one batch. It makes sense when two full review windows pass with no movement, and the page itself has been fixed in between.
At that point the cheaper lesson is about the page. The rest of the budget can stay in reserve while you work on it.
Running one batch from start to review
Pick the URL and the keyword
Use one page and one query. Two pages in one batch make it impossible to say which one responded.
Choose two or three rows within the cap
Check each price against the per-order limit and the niche, then leave the basket open for a day before you pay.
Pay once and log the dates
Write the live date and the target next to each row in your sheet, so the review has something to read.
Review after the window, not before
Read the same metrics over the same windows you used for the control page, then decide whether the next batch happens at all.
What this example does not show
The example is built to show a way of reasoning, not an outcome. Nothing in it predicts what a placement will do for your page, and the figures are chosen so the logic is easy to follow.
If a reader leaves with a number to copy into a forecast, the example has failed them. Use it to shape your own test, then run the test.
It does not show a ranking
The impressions and clicks in the example are invented. Search results move for reasons a single page cannot control, from seasonal demand to competitors publishing new material.
The control-page habit is the part worth keeping, because it guards against reading too much into a chart.
It does not replace your own sheet
Your sheet of orders, dates and windows is the only record that matters for your site. Build it before the first batch, and let it tell you what happened.
A worked example can teach the method. It cannot know your niche, your pages or your competitors.
Questions this example raises
- Why not spend the whole $500 in week one?
- Because you would have no data to steer the second batch. Spreading spend lets one batch inform the next, and it limits the damage if the page, not the links, was the weak point.
- Is a link building budget like this enough?
- For a test, yes. For a lasting effect, nobody can say, and results depend on niche, page quality and competition. Treat the budget as the price of learning, not of a ranking.
